There Are No Bad Ideas Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty - and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally. — Sam Harris

One of the finest beliefs I developed years ago that helped me to enjoy all of my life experience was the idea that there are no bad experiences, that no matter what I go through in life - whether it's a challenging experience or a pleasurable one - every experience provides me something of value if I look for it. — Tony Robbins

I thought not being part of the [Britain] union was a bad idea. We are better together.
It was dangerous for business as there were no [concrete] plans around the currency or the economy. — Michelle Mone

There's no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people's. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it first last week and you just remembered it. — Scott Adams

If so, it is inaccurate to say that the majority 'enjoy bad pictures'. They enjoy the ideas suggested to them by bad pictures. They do not really see the pictures as they are. If they did, they could not live with them. There is a sense in which bad work never is nor can be enjoyed by anyone. The people do not like the bad picture because the faces in them are like those of puppets and there is no real mobility in the lines that are meant to be moving and no energy or grace in the whole design. These faults are simply invisible to them; as the actual face of the Teddy-bear is invisible to an imaginative and warm-hearted child when it is absorbed in its play. It no longer notices that the eyes are only beads. — C.S. Lewis

Worst ideas? Me? Whatever do you mean? There are no bad ideas. — Christian Audigier

There is no evil, there's no bad; there's no good. These are human ideas. There's no creator, there's no creation; there's no God, there's no nirvana, there's no perfection. These are ideas. — Frederick Lenz

There are no bad ideas. Only bad executions. — Meinos Kaen

If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens. We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types - even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate. — Susan Cain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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