On Robustness of Ideas

‘You can imprison a man, but not an idea. You can exile a man, but not an idea. You can kill a man, but not an idea.’
— Benazir Bhutto

‘There is no adequate defence, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.’
— P. W. Bridgman

‘If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a beaten path to his door.’
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.’
— Victor Hugo

‘A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.’
— John Fitzgerald Kennedy

‘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.’
— Sean O’Casey

‘Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?’
— Josef Stalin

‘Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.’
— John H. Vincent

‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’
— Oscar Wilde

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