Power of Ideas Quotes

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.

Ideas can never be defeated by military force. They can only be defeated by better ideas.

While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.

You cannot imprison an idea. You have to fight it with a better idea.

Donald Trump, yes, he's somebody's little boy. But he is his ideas because his ideas are what's going to affect us. As a man, he can do very little. But his ideas could kill us all.

Ideas control the world.

It is useless to send armies against ideas.

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think.

The history of the world shows us that men are not to be counted by their numbers, but by the fire and vigor of their passions

You can kill a thousand; you can bring an end to life; you cannot kill an idea.

Ideas shape the course of history.

The curve is more powerful than the sword.

There is more done with pens than with swords.

You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you can not put an idea up against a barracks-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.

Ideas are intangible forces, but they have more power than the physical brains that give birth to them. They have the power to live on, after the brain that creates them has returned to dust.

What makes books - and with them writers - so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?

There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.

Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.

There is nothing more dangerous than an idea, when it is held by a man who has only one.

Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.