Old Ideas Quotes

#1. Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

John Dewey

#2. Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

Elizabeth Warren

#3. When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

Karl Marx

#4. There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.

Mark Twain

#5. He philosophy of Islam will be shown in terms of the modern philosophy, and if there are imperfections in the old ideas then they shall be removed. My task is merely constructive, and in this construction I shall take into consideration the best traditions of Islamic philosophy.

Muhammad Iqbal

#6. Land began to be seen as something to be owned privately and exploited for private interests, and never was entirely reconciled with the old ideas that land should be utilized in common for the good of all.

Neil Abercrombie

#7. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Steven Johnson

#8. Being stuck is a position few of us like. We want something new but cannot let go of the old - old ideas, beliefs, habits, even thoughts. We are out of contact with our own genius. Sometimes we know we are stuck; sometimes we don't. In both cases we have to DO something.

Rush Limbaugh

#9. No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.

Ashly Lorenzana

#10. Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.

William O. Douglas

#11. The best thing you can do to come up with a lot of new ideas is to learn a lot of old ideas. Because new ideas are just connections between old ideas, the more ideas you have in your head, the more connections you'll be able to create between them.

Yevgeniy Brikman

#12. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Patti Smith

#13. A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."

Nate Parker

#14. Old ideas from an old man about an old vision of Europe.

Denis MacShane

#15. If you always read the same old ideas, what progress can you make in the name of discovering new paths?

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#16. Keep the progress, but recover the lost values. Technically, then he's talking about renaissance: the rebirth of old ideas in a new framework.

Douglas Rushkoff

#17. Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

James Harvey Robinson

#18. Don't get stuck in old ideas. Keep recognizing that reality is changing and that your ideas have to change.

Grace Lee Boggs

#19. It is necessary to shed old ideas, habits, opinions and even companions sometimes.

Marlo Morgan

#20. Old ideas die hard. We've had thousands of years of women having almost no rights. Parts of the world are in a struggle toward very basic human rights for women, and most of the world isn't even there yet. And it's going to take a long time to change these attitudes.

Kathe Kollwitz

#21. We're stepping into a new world, and an entire way of thinking must be changed. But the old ideas can't be easily discarded. Like a pendulum, new ways must swing to the other side before returning.

Gail Tsukiyama

#22. Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good.

Kevin McCloud

#23. Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.

Edith Hamilton

#24. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of that detritus.

Steven Johnson

#25. Old ideas of not trading because 'they won't open their markets to us' miss the entire point of allowing goods to be imported into the United States - because we want and need them and because someone here believes that the good or service received in exchange for our dollars creates value for them.

Mike Pompeo

#26. The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency - to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

Derek Thompson

#27. People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.

John Fowles

#28. Clutter is not just physical stuff. It's old ideas, toxic relationships and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self.

Eleanor Brown

#29. We don't need men with new ideas as much as we need men who will put energy behind the old ideas.

William Feather

#30. Sometimes I find bringing in my old ideas is just detrimental.

Bear McCreary

#31. Permission from the government is an expensive commodity. New ideas rarely have this kind of support. Old ideas often have deep legislative connections to defend them against the new.

Lawrence Lessig

#32. Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering.

Tom Robbins

#33. If I can challenge old ideas about aging, I will feel more and more invigorated. I want to represent this new way. I want to be a new version of the 70-year-old woman. Vital, strong, very physical, very agile. I think that the older I get, the more yoga I'm going to do.

Jamie Lee Curtis

#34. Education should enable a student to think rationally, critically, and ultimately to understand, accept, and adapt with new and old ideas.

Debasish Mridha

#35. Creativity is fragile; if you don't nurture it, it can die, leaving you recycling old ideas and pretending they're fresh. It's a sure road to mediocrity.

Lee Silber

#36. The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.

Tom Peters

#37. Same mind with same old ideas enters the same old year; only the new mind with new ideas enters the New Year!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#38. Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'

Marilyn Ferguson

#39. We have a powerful potential in out youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.

Mary McLeod Bethune

#40. We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

Audre Lorde

#41. A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

George H. W. Bush

#42. I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.

Elaine Pagels

#43. New ideas should confront old ideas. We must refer to the example of Europe. People have fought to make Europe what it is today. Freedom is not something that is served up on a plate.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#44. Critics of the Wall Street protesters claim that they have old ideas, nothing new, and they're never going to work. Wait a minute., that sounds like this show.

David Letterman

#45. Rather than proposing a forward-looking energy initiative, House Republicans continue to push Big Oil's tired old ideas, ideas that will do absolutely nothing to lower gas prices for the American consumer.

Jan Schakowsky

#46. I am still hoping to see an America that would gradually move beyond race, only in times when old ideas would no longer lives and the new will grow with the young generation.

Henry Johnson Jr

#47. If you do not fling old ideas out of your mind, you cannot give birth to new ones.

Peter Deunov

#48. White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, 'What's the problem with the blacks?' The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.

Greg Iles

#49. Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.

Kent Haruf

#50. It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

Edwin Land

#51. The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#52. The idea is to become an old wizard; to live a long and fruitful life and have family and be healthy and enjoy the ride. And speaking of the ride, why not let it rip, at least a little bit? Everyone I know who's really stoked about getting out of bed in the morning does that to some extent.

Laird Hamilton

#53. Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx-first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother.

Ronald Reagan

#54. Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.

P. J. O'Rourke

#55. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign announced that it raised over $1.5 million in the 24 hours after he announced his bid. Meanwhile, a 12-year-old on Kickstarter just raised $7 million in five minutes after announcing his idea for juice box water guns.

Jimmy Fallon

#56. We always need new ideas to free us from the old ones.

Marty Rubin

#57. If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you.

Jimi Hendrix

#58. They took over from the old order not only most of its customs, conventions, and modes of thought, but even those ideas which prompted our revolutionaries to destroy it; that, in fact, though nothing was further from their intentions, they used the debris of the old order for building up the new.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#59. As we willingly enter each place of fear, each place of deficiency and insecurity in ourselves, we will discover that its walls are made of untruths, of old images of ourselves, of ancient fears, of false ideas of what is pure and what is not.

Jack Kornfield

#60. Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.

Edith Wharton

#61. We kept the old male ideas of success: power and money. We need new ones!

Zosia Mamet

#62. The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

Bernard Bailyn

#63. Those that cannot produce ideas often speak with the old proverbs!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#64. old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history

Amy Tan

#65. There's no Hell mentioned in the Old Testament. The punishment of the dead is not specified there. It's only with gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that the idea of eternal torture for minor transgressions is introduced.

Christopher Hitchens

#66. 'Allen Gregory' came about because we wanted an animated show and we were just tossing around some ideas about me playing a 7-year-old. We thought that would be cool, because we couldn't do that in real life.

Jonah Hill

#67. Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Richard Bach

#68. Do not get obsolete like an old technology, keep innovating yourself.

Sukant Ratnakar

#69. Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past.

Mark McKinnon

#70. Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.

Alfred Kazin

#71. The hardest part of learning something new is not embracing new ideas, but letting go of old ones.

Todd Rose

#72. The idea that I would ever end up on David Letterman or Jay Leno is horrifying. I am such a freak in comparison to most other twenty-five-year-old guys. I have no idea what other people are thinking. I'm not really in touch.

Jared Leto

#73. The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

John Maynard Keynes

#74. Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves.

G.K. Chesterton

#75. Humans cannot find freedom until they let go of old obsolete ideas.

Robert Kiyosaki

#76. Usually my ideas come from what I don't want to do, or what I find is old.

Miuccia Prada

#77. Getting bogged down in old stories stops the flow of learning by censoring our perceptions, making us functionally deaf and blind to new information. Once the replay button gets pushed, we no longer form new ideas or conclusions - the old ones are so cozy.

Martha Beck

#78. To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to stink of Zen.

Alan Watts

#79. I'm a 'tweener,' man! I couldn't march with Dr. King and them. And I'm too old to be a hip-hopper. But I've been granted honorary status in each generation ... I see my tongue as a bridge over which ideas can travel back and forth.

Michael Eric Dyson

#80. The Jew is not satisfied with de-Christianizing, he Judiazizes, he destroys the Catholic or Protestant faith, he provokes indifference but he imposes his idea of the world of morals and of life upon those whose faith he ruins. He works at his age old task, the annilation of the religion of Christ.

Bernard Lazare

#81. Laws have come down to us from old customs and folk-ways based on primitive ideas of man's origin, capacity and responsibility.

Clarence Darrow

#82. Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.

Max McKeown

#83. Brothers and sisters: Now is not the time for thinking small, now is not the time for the same-old, same-old establishment politics and stale inside-the-Beltway ideas.

Bernie Sanders

#84. New ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.

Jonah Lehrer

#85. I like a lot of old films, I like a lot old music, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that I like the idea of knowing what happens before, so that I can understand it.

Zooey Deschanel

#86. I read a lot of bad scripts and weird television shows. I don't know. There's a lot of work out there I was reading at 14 years old and noticing this lack of thought. And then, reading 'Afterschool,' that's full of thought. It was bursting with ideas.

Ezra Miller

#87. All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which must be rooted out.

Lu Xun

#88. All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea - the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgements, acts and efforts.

Dee Hock

#89. I always have the idea in mind that when Botticelli was an old man nobody cared about him because he was out of fashion. Imagine, Botticelli was out of fashion!

Norbert Bisky

#90. But weddings tend to resurrect old issues, old emotions; new ideas, new possibilities.

Lisa Berne

#91. To take in a new idea you must destroy the old, let go of old opinions, to observe and conceive new thoughts. To learn is but to change your opinion.

B. J. Palmer

#92. The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

Theodore Zeldin

#93. Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much - thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's viewpoint.

Laura Riding

#94. Fortune follows those who can create ideas by connecting old ones. Strong personal brands are created when connection and creation connect.

Ryan Lilly

#95. There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

Malcolm Gladwell

#96. The idea of putting old Browborough into prison for conduct which habit had made second nature to a large proportion of the House was distressing to Members of Parliament generally.

Anthony Trollope

#97. The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans.

Lewis Mumford

#98. The whole idea of timing tests is a century old, from a scientist who thought speed and ability were tightly correlated, which they are not.

L. Todd Rose

#99. The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.

Edwin Land

#100. An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader's premier trait.

Tom Peters