Concept Evolution Quotes

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from other ideas.

Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.

It's really clear to me that you can't hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.

The best ideas lose their owners and take on lives of their own.

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

Creating a new theory is not like destroying an old barn and erecting a skyscraper in its place. It is rather like climbing a mountain and gaining new and wider views.

An idea or an insight doesn't come from a single happening, it requires a meeting to alter a perspective. Often it takes a while for the events to collide, but when they do it is inevitable that a change will follow.

All ideas grow out of other ideas.

When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the soul's temperature with respect to it is usually very cold. Only gradually does the idea develop its warmth, and it is hottest (which is to say, exerting its greatest influence) when belief in the idea is already once again in decline.

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

Design is an iterative process. One idea often builds on another.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

I presume that few who have paid any attention to the history of the Mathematical Analysis, will doubt that it has been developed in a certain order, or that that order has been, to a great extent, necessary -- being determined, either by steps of logical deduction, or by the successive introduction of new ideas and conceptions, when the time for their evolution had arrived.

Scientific progress consists in the development of new concepts.

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

I kept saying I want to do an episode that's set in the past, how do we do a period episode of Black Mirror? And simultaneously there was another idea we were thinking about and the two things sort of gelled and became San Junipero.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change.

I like to explore different ideas of race, how the concept of race has evolved in the country. It's one thing I enjoy talking about, but I don't feel compelled to talk about it.

Science advances, not by the accumulation of new facts, but by the continuous development of new concepts.

Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.