I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.
The truth is that one is more frequently blessed with ideas while working.
I admire American ideas.
I know my political ideas affect what I write, but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.
The idea that a musician can submit music online for the chance to have it promoted to a nationwide audience is the American dream come true, and a major step toward democratizing how music is discovered.
You would kill or enslave everyone? There is so much beauty in the world that they’d destroy. How do you not see it? (Delphine) Spoken like someone who has only lived in the cushioned world of dreams. You have no idea what the real world is like. What people will do to you when they know they can get away with it. People are absolutely cruel and I say more power to Noir for tearing it down. (Jericho)
The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard.
Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.
It is always delightful when a great and beautiful idea proves to be consonant with reality.
The authentic thing is to follow your heart, your instincts, your emotions. If you located yourself in an idea, your life would be lived very sadly.
You don't solve anything ever, really. You simply state a problem which, when you're lucky, gives you some idea of what possible problems you can - it indicates, you know, your future headaches.
This rationale, which justified the mixed constitution of Great Britain, might have made some sense in 1776, but by 1787 most American thinkers had come to believe that all parts of their balanced governments represented in one way or another the sovereign people. They had left the Aristotelian idea of mixed estates - monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy - way behind. [John] Adams had not, and his stubbornness on this point caused him no end of trouble.
I try to see each new season as a new challenge because I have a new team to work with, new opponents to encounter, and often new ideas and theories to try
My idea was to build Liverpool into a bastion of invincibility. Had Napoleon had that idea he would have conquered the bloody world. I wanted Liverpool to be untouchable. My idea was to build Liverpool up and up until eventually everyone would have to submit and give in.
There has been a plan in effect since at least 1917 to create, an artificial Extraterrestrial threat to the planet Earth, so as to bring about a one-world, Luciferian Totalitarian socialist government. This Extraterrestrial propaganda has been promoted through movies, through books, in the newspapers; so as to create the idea in the public mind that this phenomena related to Extraterrestrials is real and that the threat is real.
The person with just one good idea is a thousand times better off than the person with no good ideas.
I'm proud of my ability to understand what somebody else is trying to do and help them achieve it, because part of the aesthetic of improvisation is service. You never say no. Serve the servant, follow the follower. And that's very valuable in your life, as well as very valuable in your actor's work. I'm damn proud of my ability to help other people achieve their ideas.
I began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public's idea of this myth comes from a million different places. . . I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story.
He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.
The basic idea was that if a country would put its economy as an integrated piece of the world system, that it would benefit from that with economic growth. I concur with that basic view.