I. F. Stone Quotes

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

So many new ideas are at first strange and horrible though ultimately valuable that a very heavy responsibility rests upon those who would prevent their dissemination.

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas.

We want to challenge the established ideas with new ideas.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Ideas have unhinged the gates of empires.

Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men

Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on.

Not every obnoxious talk leads to progress, but we cannot tell which unusual idea, which seditious thought will be tomorrow's accepted truth and enshrined right ... after all, all that we take for granted, was once deemed extremely objectionable... So, not knowing where the next big step in the progress of human civilization will come from, we open our ears, our minds and our hearts to the new, the unusual and the contrarian.

All who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the state or its laws!

The day for progress by force has passed. From now on it will be progress by ideas or not at all.

At the beginning of the '70s, everything was possible.

All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

Society never progresses because the majority one day wakes up and says, “Let’s do things differently.” The majority didn’t wake up and say, “Oh, let’s just free the slaves.” ... Society always progressed because a relatively small group of people — usually considered outrageous radicals by the status quo of their time — had a better idea and articulated another way. That’s simply how evolution works; it’s the mutation — the member of the species who does things differently - that points the way to the future because they’re better adapted for survival.

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.

Throughout history, people with new ideas—who think differently and try to change things—have always been called troublemakers.

There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

As our case is new, we must think and act anew.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.

A revolutionary idea is usually one with its sleeves rolled up.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.