Quotes About Original Thought

“One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.”

— Diogenes Laërtius

“I hang out with war vets in a hospital they will never leave alive.i was out in the garden with the alzheimers and asked them if god wears pnts, G my adopted father answered immediately,No he wears a G'String. we all laughed so loud it brought the nurses running and then pretended to be discussing a stringed bridge over a river and all sat straight faced. an original thought God wears a G-String.”

— Ijosephi Lowly Worm

“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”

— Edward L. Bernays

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“Curiously, Laura Warholic is one of those novels in which the characters actually read books.You don't often see this in contemporary fiction. People resent polysyllabic words, find it showing off, never look them up, refuse to play. Words are to a writer what paint is to an artist. I am amazed at how readers refuse to enjoy the out-of-the-way fact, the astonishing detail, the original thought. Style is taken as an affront by stupid and lazy people. Just say it, they say. Sure! Should I die or should I live basically sums up Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy. Why didn't he just say so!?”

— Alexander Theroux

“The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.”

— Thomas A. Edison

“I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it”

— Cormac McCarthy

“When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embedding a pattern of thought. When an emotion is tied to this thought pattern, the memory trace grows exponentially stronger.”

— Lysa TerKeurst

“Your brain, Peekay, has two functions; it is a place for original thought, but also it is a reference library. Use it to tell you where to look, and then you will have for yourself all the brains that have ever been”

— Bryce Courtenay

“No original thought still exists. People are original, each one of them. The same ideas that others had before you are waiting for you to bring them back to life in a new way. The part of who you are that is left behind within these old ideas is what makes them original all over again.”

— Ashly Lorenzana

“An original thought would crack your feeble skull like a thunderbolt, you craven vulture.”

— Christopher Moore

“Song-Mi Lee, ... her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought.”

— David Lodge

“A female's body should be looked at and respected as something divine. At least, that was the original thought, but time marches on, and the sanctity of the sacred body is no longer sacred.”

— Lionel Suggs

“The thing that I was brought up to prize above everything else is the intellect. There is no problem that the intellect cannot solve, but it never had an original thought. Originality is the realm of the unconscious.”

— Alan Garner

“We would have to invent the U.N. if we did not have it, which is not an original thought.”

— Shirley Temple

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over ... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, boy, there's an original thought!”

— Charles M. Schulz

“Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment.”

— Johan Huizinga

“I had a date with a girl I called 'the parrot.' All she did was repeat everything I said. She never had an original thought of her own. Everything I liked, she liked. Everything I hated, she hated. It was annoying!”

— Justin Chon

“Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first.”

— Jim Thompson

“I feel like everything is inspired by something else. There is no 100 percent original thought.”

— Ne-Yo

“Schooling as it presently exists, like science before and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propagate, to never make waves, and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope.”

— Derrick Jensen

“Dalton had expected it, he never failed to find it remarkable the way he had but to say a thing enough times, through enough people, and it became the popular truth, its provenance lost as it was mimicked by ordinary people who came to believe that it was their own idea-as if original thought routinely came forth from their witless minds of clay.”

— Terry Goodkind

“Contempt
The contempt I feel for others-for myself different, less internal than guilt.
 
It's not that I think (or have ever thought) I was bad-through and through. I think I'm unattractive, unloveable, because I'm incomplete. It's not what I am that's wrong, it's that I'm not more (responsive, alive, generous, considerate, original, sensitive, brave etc.).
 
My profoundest experience is of indifference, rather than censure.”

— Susan Sontag

“A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.”

— H.L. Mencken

“People make sequels a lot in Hollywood, and sometimes it feels like there's never an original thought.”

— Jacqueline Bisset

“Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.”

— Salman Rushdie

“I've always wanted to be on an original cast recording. I grew up listening to them, and now to know that my voice is heard on three or four of them is just surreal. I never thought I would be that person.”

— Laura Osnes

“Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.”

— Fran Lebowitz

“Our society, where we are right now, our minds are junkyards. We watch TV and sit on the computer all day and barely have an original thought.”

— Melissa Etheridge

“There is a distinction between what may be called a problem and what may be considered an exercise. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little if any, original thought ... No exercise, then, can always be done with reasonbable dispatch and with a miniumum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require though on the part of the student.”

— Howard Whitley Eves

“What is it to know a variety of languages, but merely to have a variety of sounds express the same idea? Original thought is ore of the mind; language is but the stamp and coinage by which it is put into circulation.”

— Washington Irving

“There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.”

— James Garner

“One Original Thought is worth 1000 Meaningless Quotes.”

— Banksy

“Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.”

— Edward Bernays

“Wonder Showzen is one of my favorite shows of all time. When I first saw it, I thought it was so funny and new and original and edgy and insane and subversive. I didn't know comedy could do that.”

— Eric Andre

“Hollywood's thinking is very typical. And it's just really predictable too. And I think at Hollywood, these box office movies are flopping. I mean, there hasn't been an original thought coming out of Hollywood since the '80s.”

— Andrea Tantaros

“Over the years, whenever I've felt that little twinkle in the hairs on the back of my neck., as I encountered an original thought or observation in a fishing book, I've turned the corner of the page down.”

— Arnold Gingrich

“I've never had an original thought in my lifeand there's tons of people on the internet happy to tell me just that.”

— Shepard Fairey

“War Is A Racket : I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher- ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service”

— Smedley Butler

“They have never affirm'd any thing, concerning the Cause, till the Trial was past: whereas, to do it before, is a most venomous thing in the making of Sciences; for whoever has fix'd on his Cause, before he experimented; can hardly avoid fitting his Experiment to his Observations, to his own Cause, which he had before imagin'd; rather than the Cause to the Truth of the Experiment itself. Referring to experiments of the Aristotelian mode, whereby a preconceived truth would be illustrated merely to convince people of the validity of the original thought.”

— Thomas Sprat

“Religion disapproves of original thought the way Dracula does sunlight.”

— Pat Condell

“I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.”

— William Benton Clulow

“Before I even put pen to paper, in any sense, I'm like, "What's the coolest MacGuffin you can come up with? What are the last frames of this series?" The secret that's behind this entire thing is to be as evocative, original, thought-provoking and timely.”

— Paul Scheuring

“The majority of business men are not capable of an original thought, simply because they cannot escape the tyranny of reason.”

— David Ogilvy

“The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations-more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.”

— Jacob Bronowski

“One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.”

— Jacob Bronowski

“If there's an original thought out there, I could use one right now.”

— Bob Dylan

“Rather than understand the original cause-a thought-we try to change the stressful feelings by looking outside ourselves.”

— Byron Katie

“I love hanging out with my friends and family. I really, really, really love articulating original thought. That's probably my core, my biggest buzz. Because then it makes me feel like I know why I was born. Reaching original thought, where I know that I'm perceiving something that only I have seen, and I need to incarnate that. That's it right there.”

— Caroline Myss

“The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.”

— H.L. Mencken