George Steiner Quotes

Ideas control the world.

Power, before it comes from arms or wealth, emanates from ideas.

To an imagination of any scope the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.

Not mythical material productive forces, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs. What is needed to stop the trend toward socialism and despotism is common-sense and moral courage.

The State idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with narrow-minded and economic obstacles. I believe it is bad. I have always been against it.

Killing for ideas is the most dangerous form of killing at all. Being willing to die for your ideas rather than your country is another concept, but dying for an idea, like in religion, is absurd.

Political figures who talk a lot about liberty and freedom invariably turn out to mean the freedom to not pay taxes and discriminate based on race; freedom to hold different ideas and express them, not so much.

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras' and Goethe's idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos. Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days; his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it's rhythmic impulses.

An individual is as alive as he has ideas. He's as aware as he has ideas.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work. If you're passionate about an idea that's stuck in your head, find a way to build it so you can prove to yourself that it doesn't work.

When you're in the editing process, you try different things and you get creative ideas.

The whole of God is present at every point in space at the same time. Take time to meditate on this great idea. In other words, God doesn't come and go. God doesn't capriciously move substance from God's supply "up there" to fill your needs "down here." Nor does God answer prayer in some kind of coming forth. God is always present, totally present - as a Presence.

The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.

There's a literal track: who says what to whom, what are people wearing, etcetera. And there's the abstract track: what ideas are suggested by the literal. And the real movie takes place in the relationship between the literal and the abstract.

A lot of times it's the child that sees something and not the grownup. I love that because, when readers get older, they start looking for the most important ideas in the story. They don't look at things in the same way anymore. Children haven't really learned to do that yet. They take all their great, intellectual skills, look at the full page, and appreciate all of the different things.

An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God.

If I collaborate with people, ideas...they take interesting turns and twists, and I'm excited for that and that process and excited to see what we come up with.

Any idea of a United India could never have worked and in my judgment it would have led us to terrific disaster.

In a nutshell, the idea of Juche means that the masters of the revolution and the work of construction are the masses of the people and that they are also the motive force of the revolution and the work of construction. In other words, one is responsible for one's own destiny and one has also the capacity for hewing out one's own destiny.

The secret of not having worries, for me at least, is to have ideas.

The press still thinks [global warming] is controversial. So they find the 1% of the scientists and put them up as if they're 50% of the research results. You in the public would have no idea that this is basically a done deal and that we're on to other problems, because the journalists are trying to give it a 50/50 story. It's not a 50/50 story. It's not. Period.

Scarcity is a captivating book, overflowing with new ideas, fantastic stories, and simple suggestions that just might change the way you live.

It seems to me that a great university ought to have room in it for men subscribing to every sort of idea that is currently prevalent