(John) Sparrow had no interest in ideas. Presented with any problem, his acute mind would unerringly light on the outer periphery, there to play with some marginal triviality.
Ideas Quotes
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
I suggest that the anthropomorphic god-idea is not a harmless infirmity of human thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is largely responsible for the calamities the world is at present enduring.
Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.
Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.
Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers.
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion – the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
On two occasions I have been asked (by Members of Parliament), ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blue-prints of your ultimate achievements.
