Bad Ideas Quotes & Sayings

My dad was a labour lawyer, and the ideas that I grew up with - bad management, bad capitalism, robber barons - when I applied this to my own life, I saw that we are all on both sides of the coin. — David Mamet

Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not! — Richard Dawkins

Grief is Newark. It's there. Can't avoid it. The idea is to hold your nose, hope the traffic's not too bad and get on to Manhattan as quickly as possible. — Eli Attie

Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another. — Samuel Butler

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better.
Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013 — Paul Graham

Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect: It tends to create the inability to accept new ideas. — Dean Williams

Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing. — Ben Horowitz

I'm sitting at the bar, rearranging the order of my jokes. I'm under the delusion that I'm having bad shows because of some cosmic misalignment of words, phrases, and ideas. I may as well have cast runes into a spirit bowl, hoping that the collective heart of the audience would open to my necromantic call. Maybe that's how jugglers do it. Those guys never have shitty sets. — Patton Oswalt

Despite all these obstacles and bad security situation, I have the energy and the resolve to train, but my head is full of ideas and it distracts me, and I need to focus. — Dana Hussein

You see a lot of good ideas or well-written scripts that are bad ideas. — John McTiernan

As far as bad ideas went, this stole the prize. — Julia Quinn

Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them. — Seth Godin

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know
which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension! — Anton Chekhov

The common idea that scientists reject a theory as soon as it leads to a contradiction is just not so. When they get something that works at all they plunge ahead with it and ignore its weak spots ... scientists are just as bad as the rest of the public in following fads and being influenced by mass enthusiasm. — Vannevar Bush

No, not really. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just a part. You just go into it, and like your life, you're walking along the street, as a really bad analogy, you step on a little stone, and it just kind of flies away and you have no idea where it's going. And then you are just trying not to drown afterwards. And that's my life. See, that was really terrible. — Robert Pattinson

During any moment in which you're experiencing thoughts that make you feel sick or bad, do your best to change them to thoughts that support the idea of feeling good. Refuse to talk about disease, and work to activate thoughts that predict recovery and overall well-being. — Wayne Dyer

A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make. — Debbi Fields

New ideas can be supremely bad ideas, and by the time people realize how bad they are, it is sometimes difficult to get rid of them. — Alister E. McGrath

When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions; you should just listen to him, just observe what his way is. We put very little emphasis on right and wrong or good and bad. We just see things as they are with him, and accept them. This is how we communicate with each other. Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may not even really hear it. — Shunryu Suzuki

Testing children until they cry is a bad idea. It is an educational malpractice. — Diane Ravitch

There's only one thing in life more dangerous than a bad idea, and that's a good one. — Greg Curtis

Working with people who cause your stomach to churn seems much like marrying for money - probably a bad idea under any circumstances, but absolute madness if you are already rich. — Warren Buffett

You have to free your brain to roam to places that are a little impractical, and innovation consultants have come up with some great ways to encourage that. One of my favorites comes from Legrand, who tells people in group brainstorming sessions to try to come up with the WORST possible ideas that they can think of ... Once you have a list of really, really bad suggestions - and coming up with them does force your brain to work in a different way - you try to flip them over into the positive. — Amanda Lang

Purity of action guided Janis's behavior. If she was going to be good, she was very, very good. If she was going to be bad, she let all the stops out. Anything less than full commitment to an idea of activity was 'hypocritical', the worst adjective anyone could hurl at another. — Laura Joplin

When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time. — David Mamet

As an individual navigating this reality, you have to make choices to survive. Sometimes you happily work for free if it's something you love and believe in. I'm not categorically saying that working for free is bad. I'm just looking at the broader implications of it, and also challenge this idea - and again, this is an argument made by certain people in the tech world - that amateurs are automatically more pure and will triumph over stodgy professionals. — Astra Taylor

Your ideas of good and bad are just a certain level of prejudice against life. The — Sadhguru

The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us. — Karl Popper

I think it's human nature to blame yourself. When things fuck up in life, you always want to find a reason for it. There has to be a reason, right? Bad things don't just happen, especially to good people. So we sit around and try to make sense of it all, and the only sense we can make is that we probably deserved it, so we make up these ideas in our heads. — Jay McLean

Because 98 percent of our ideas are not great ideas, or everyone would be a billionaire. So yeah. That's something people have had a lot of experience in: being told our idea is bad or our performance is bad. I think that's the one common thread between all working actors is that they have a pretty thick skin - or you'd like to hope. You're used to rejection, that's for sure. — Dax Shepard

When women read romance books, one of two things generally happen." Mal ran a hand through his lovely locks. "They either want to discuss the book in great depth. And probably, life and your relationship. Now sometimes that's okay. You reach a higher level of understanding with each other and shit. But sometimes it sucks, pure and simple. You wind up getting bitched at for days because of something the dude in the book did that makes you look bad. But if it's an awesome book, however, a hot one? Well then ... kinky fuckery like you wouldn't believe, man. The ideas Pumpkin has gotten out of some of those books. Gold. I could never have talked her into trying half of that stuff. — Kylie Scott

Our minds are a battle ground between good and bad ideas; we are whatever side wins the battle — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Now, part of the problem with the climate debate is that so much gas board language like that [the IPCC's language] has been used and there's been too little plain, scientific, and economic thinking. And so, the entire political class has been captured by an idea, which as always with the best bad ideas has a grain of truth in it, which is then exaggerated beyond all reason. This has happened before - one thinks of the Dreyfus case, for instance. — Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton Of Brenchley

Sometimes people's spiritual ideas become fixed and they use them against those who don't share their beliefs - in effect, becoming fundamentalist. It's very dangerous - the finger of righteous indignation pointing at someone who is identified as bad or wrong. — Pema Chodron

I deliberately state my age because it keeps me honest. I think lying is a bad idea. Sooner or later, someone's going to catch you. — Rita Moreno

There are some people who know who I am but there are a lot of people that have no idea who I am - which is not to say that that's a bad thing. — Jim Gaffigan

When I said I've always wanted you, I meant all of you: your body, your ideas, your memories, your whole heart. I want your dreams, your spare drawer, your mornings, your worries. Your triumphs, your laughter, your bad nights and your quiet days. I want your future, Ren.... just so we're clear." Cole — A.J. DeWall

The idea of a terrorist attack that assaults innocent human beings in a building or a mall or a restaurant is bad enough. Yet the terrorist mind that looks at a passenger plane and sees the fuel and the intensity of the blast, and sees the rocket engines that will carry it into the heart of destruction like a cruise missile, but who does not see the humanity of one single soul on that airplane, is the chilling truth of what we're up against. — Alan Keyes

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. — Virginia Woolf

Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension: but within inside us she gives them such measures as she wills: death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, coloured with qualities of her own choosing: brown or green; light or dark; bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls, who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is Queen in her own state. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything, the responsibility lies within ourselves. Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves not to Fortune: she has no power over our behaviour, on the contrary our souls drag Fortune in their train and mould her to their own idea. — Michel De Montaigne

My ideas are like a Hydra. Remove a bad one and two good ones will take its place. — Paul E. Petty

China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea. — Fran Lebowitz

Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups — Paul Krugman

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop, ... Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public. — John McCain

There is good and bad in all of us and the Church uses the idea of original sin to control us by saying that, if we do not obey the bishops, we will rot in Hell. — Tony Benn

If you expect more from yourself than from others, you are saying that you are better than others and, therefore, must perform at a superior level. I do not mean that you should not set goals for yourself. Rather, the question is, how do you react if you cannot meet these goals? Honestly admitting that you may have not done your best is not judgement. It is judgement when you draw a conclusion about yourself based on your ideas about failure.
Honesty involves taking responsibility; judgment has to do with blame. To view yourself as bad or a failure because you did not accomplish what you set out to do is judgment. To state clearly and simply that you did not accomplish your plan is taking responsibility. — Judith Hanson Lasater

Architects spend an entire life with this unreasonable idea that you can fight against gravity. — Renzo Piano

The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don't change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through anew identity and new purpose, whether it's that of a nation or a single human being. — Rebecca Solnit

Bad habits are more easily formed than good habits, and the bad habits are given up with more difficulty. The natural depravity of the heart accounts for this well-known fact - that it takes far less labor to demoralize the youth, to corrupt their ideas of moral and religious character, than to engraft upon their character the enduring, pure, and uncorrupted habits of righteousness and truth. — Ellen G. White

But this is war. We don't have the luxury of good ideas - only picking between the bad ones. — Sarah J. Maas

I was fascinated by information about the Earth's magnetic field in my geological studies, and started wondering what would happen if long-overdue changes in geomagnetism manifested in modern times. I decided, working with my wife Tiane, to take these ideas further by adding a dash of adventure and dramatic twists and turns exploring how different types of people, good and bad, might react. — J. Barry Reid

Evil is a really tough concept for me. The idea of a villain that is bad for bad's sake seems kind of absurd. — Christopher McQuarrie

I'm the king of bad ideas. — Lisa Kessler

If critics and competitors can't match your results, they will often denigrate the way you achieve them. Fast, intuitive types are called lazy. Dedicated burners of the midnight oil are called obsessed. And while it's obviously not a bad idea to hear and consider the opinions of others, you should be suspicious when these criticisms emerge right on the heels of success. — Garry Kasparov

Your competition is not other people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to generate ideas, the people around you who don't support and love your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck. — James Altucher

The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes. — Alan Watts

I like the idea that people get engaged thinking about design, about creativity. I don't see how it could possibly be bad. — Susan Orlean

Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel sh*t from a sitting position. — Stephen King

I got some bad ideas in my head. — Robert De Niro

Never give up on an idea simply because it is bad and doesn't work. — George Carlin

You can make an idea spread for good but you can also make an idea spread for bad and the power to make an idea spread, memetics, you know which now people talk about memes. — Jay Roach

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment. — Shaun Tan

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one. — Charles McCarry

There is a saying that bad traders divorce their spouse sooner than abandon their positions. Loyalty to ideas is not a good thing for traders, scientists - or anyone. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The typical eye sees the ten per cent bad of an idea and overlooks the ninety per cent good. — Charles Kettering

The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas. — John Derbyshire

The challenge is simple: Quitting when you hit the Dip is a bad idea. If the journey you started was worth doing, then quitting when you hit the Dip just wastes the time you've already invested. Quit in the Dip often enough and you'll find yourself becoming a serial quitter, starting many things but accomplishing little. Simple: If you can't make it through the Dip, don't start. If you can embrace that simple rule, you'll be a lot choosier about which journeys you start. — Seth Godin

I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas. — Michael Moorcock

Even if these researchers do see the need to address the problem immediately, though they have obligations and legitimate interests elsewhere, including being funded for other research. With luck, the ideas discussed in Good Calories, Bad Calories may be rigorously tested in the next twenty years. If confirmed, it will be another decade or so after that, at least, before our public health authorities actively change their official explanation for why we get fat, how that leads to illness, and what we have to do to avoid or reverse those fates. As I was told by a professor of nutrition at New York University after on of my lectures, the kind of change I'm advocating could take a lifetime to be accepted. — Gary Taubes

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone. — Sergio Troncoso

The only reason the House hasn't done even more damage is that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas, making the bills merely bad, not disastrous. — Jonathan Alter

The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things-ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later, or six months, or six years. But he has faith that it will happen. — Carl Ally

Take time to reflect, let ideas flow on their own schedule and let yourself have numerous bad ideas to inspire the good ones. — Joanie Connell

I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too. — Jeffrey Tucker

Everything is an idea for something, something that touches the imagination, a fact that seems relevant or maybe just a statement I find interesting - either because it resonates or because I disagree. All of it is fodder for continued work or thinking on the topics. It's also important to me to record the ideas that my instincts tell me are bad. — Elizabeth Spiers

Bad ideas are my favorite kind. — V.E Schwab

You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good, or revolutions can be bad. — Jonah Goldberg

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either. — Kevin Henkes

The idea of Ghost Stories is how to turn something bad into something that gives you an uplift. — Chris Martin

I don't believe in writer's block. There are good days when you're writing and less good days. I've learned that if it's not happening to walk away and return later. I doodle a lot and often get my best ideas with a pencil in my hand while I'm doodling. The problem is, sometimes I lose my doodles and that's bad! — Judy Blume

Each person is made of five different elements, she told me.
Too much fire and you had a bad temper. That was like my father, whom my mother always critized for his cigarette habit and who always shouted back that she should feel guilty that he didn't let my mother speak her mind.
Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to other people's ideas, unable to stand on your own. This was like my Auntie An-mei.
Too much water and you flowed in too many different directions. like myself. — Amy Tan

Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.
All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness. — Joseph Joubert

The more romance novelists that are out there, making romanticized ideas of vampirism for the kids, the more people want to see a real action movie, putting the bad guys where they belong, as the bad guys, and looking for a hero to come along and defend our very souls. — Corey Feldman

Occasionally, a great band would come along, like Blondie or OutKast who could be pop and bring interesting ideas into the mainstream at the same time. That's now gone, because of this weird mutation of pop, rap, R&B, bad rave, and supposedly soulful singing on top of it. — Johnny Marr

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are! — Lewis Carroll

I do support a sex-positive attitude for young people. Use condoms, that's important. I love the idea that promiscuity can be healthy but it's got some dodgy crevasses. Ooh, that's a bad reference! But it's got some dangerous cavities there. You know what I'm saying. — Rachael Taylor

When communism failed, it wasn't a good idea that had gone wrong, it was a bad idea that had been sustained with incredible determination in the face of all the commonsense arguments, and at the cost of 20 million lives at least, in Russia, to build the socialist Utopia. — Martin Amis

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

My heart pounded annoyingly in my ears, and it was getting harder to stay focused. I'd almost gotten trapped in here, and now I'd come back. Sometimes I did have truly terrible ideas. — Gwenda Bond

Annie took another sip of the vodka, letting the alcohol seep through her system, turning bad ideas into good ones. — Kevin Wilson

I'm attracted to the idea of drowning. Or rather the idea of jumping off and being enveloped by something, not bad or good, just enveloping.
When I was a kid, I had a moment when I got under the water, lying on the pool floor, and felt I could breathe. I've been trying to recreate that feeling ever since. — Florence Welch

The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. — Alfred Whitney Griswold

You can't have good ideas unless you're willing to generate a lot of bad ones. — Seth Godin

The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress. — C.S. Lewis

The idea that a game is anything more than a game ... You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, 'There's golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!' You can overdo what you really like, and if you're unbalanced you go overboard. — Gary Gygax

Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: Take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground. — George Carlin

A writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas. My idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around. — Stephen King

Have you ever had a big idea or dream - something you wanted so bad ... but you were too scared to make it happen, or maybe you didn't really believe it could? Think of how often you've had someone you looked up to or viewed as successful - shoot one of your suggestions full of holes. Ideas and babies have a lot in common - they require a lot of nourishment to survive. A new idea, regardless of its size, may not be able to withstand a beating when you first give it birth. — Bob Proctor

It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce - Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story! — H.P. Lovecraft

I know that nuclear is better than fossil fuels when it comes to carbon dioxide, but nuclear energy is by no means clean. We don't know what to do with the waste we already have and it seems like a bad idea to me to make more when we have so many cleaner options such as wind and solar. — Sheryl Crow