Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Ideas have unhinged the gates of empires.

The most revolutionary ideas are not sellable, but only mind-changing.

Remember: you cannot build a better mouse trap by fixing the old one - NewCo demands active ownership, and that activity is not the sum of doing multiple jobs but, instead, the sum of implementing paradigm-shifting changes that create new industries and solutions.

Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain. Every important revolution needs both kinds of minds to complete itself.

The power to rethink a situation is our greatest tool for transforming the world. This notion is taking hold in medicine, in business, in education. But not in politics and the media. They are the last holdouts of old-paradigm thinking.

Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.

What I'm advocating is an intellectual revolution - it's a different mindset concerning the ethical benchmarks by which we live.

There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our st idity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.

If everybody thinks you're out of your mind, you just might be onto something.

A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.

All great thinkers are initially ridiculed - and eventually revered.

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.

A change of values - that means, a change of the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

The most powerful thing in the world is an idea.

In the age of revolution you have to be able to imagine revolutionary alternatives to the status quo. If you can't, you'll be relegated to the swollen ranks of keyboard-pounding automatons.

Events and developments, such as ... the Copernican Revolution, ... occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound by certain "obvious" methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.

Innovation violates tradition--attacks it in public and steals from it in private.

At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different

A radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

It would be wonderful if ideas could be the new rock 'n roll