Jonathan Swift Quotes

The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience.

Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner.

Those who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the universe.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

The credit of advancing science has always been due to individuals and never to the age.

So, okay, I'm not a genius. Vincent Van Gogh and Albert Einstein were geniuses.

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis.

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

I cannot escape from the conclusion that the great ages of progress have depended upon a small number of individuals of transcendent ability.

Men who have changed the world never achieved their success by winning the chief citizens to their side, but always by stirring the masses.

The power to rethink a situation is our greatest tool for transforming the world. This notion is taking hold in medicine, in business, in education. But not in politics and the media. They are the last holdouts of old-paradigm thinking.

Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of our own philosophical times; ages of genius had passed away, and they left no other record than their works; no preconcerted theory described the workings of the imagination to be without imagination, nor did they venture to teach how to invent invention.

The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.

Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world.

There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our st idity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.

I am in the world to change the world.

...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

As we awaken individually, we will act more powerfully collectively.