Ben Hecht Quotes

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

The great thing about ideas is that every new idea leads to two more new ones. It’s the opposite of a gold rush, where the more people who show up in 1849 to get that gold in California, the faster the gold runs out. Ideas are not like that; ideas breed.

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

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed.

What I believe is important is that we win the battle of ideas.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

In times of conflict, America tends to focus on personalities over ideas or movements, trying to play the man, not the board — as if capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, for example, would instantly end the present conflict. But such thinking loses sight of the fact that ideas have consequences. If one believes that God commands something, this belief is not likely to dissipate just because the person who elucidated it has been silenced. Islam, as a faith, is as essential a feature of the terrorist threat today as it was of the Barbary piracy over two centuries ago.

If you do come up with a new idea, in 4 seconds it will belong to somebody else.

Sociology almost always dominates technology. Ideas often lie unused because people do not want to use them.

My critics were entirely right in writing that certain fundamental ideas in my article would, if pursued to their conclusion, result in the dissolution of the left-wing cultural movement.

Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression … How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, "a chariot wheel" which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common

… there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas--it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

One who accepts the general ideas of his time gets along smoothest, but he does least for progress.

The man with a new idea is a crank until his idea succeeds.

Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.

If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

The new idea either finds a champion or it dies. No ordinary involvement with a new idea provides the energy required to cope with the indifference and resistance that change provokes.

Nobody has the right to shield any idea as so sacred it can’t be challenged. ... Almost all human progress is driven by people who stood up and said ‘I disagree’ with this idea that society at the time considered to be the most precious.’

What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.