"A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea." (Victor Hugo, "The History of a Crime", 1851–1852)
"Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions." (Oliver W Holmes, "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table", 1891)
"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)
"If you don’t stop this senseless theorizing upon something that’s an obvious impossibility, you’ll find yourself working alone! Your ridiculous ideas sound like the ravings of a madman. Anyone with average intelligence realizes that the mere thought of traveling through time is absurd." (L Arthur Eshbach, "Out of the Past", Tales of Wonder, 1938)
'Of all the fantastic ideas that belong to science fiction, the most remarkable - and, perhaps, the most fascinating - is that of time travel [...] Indeed, so fantastic a notion does it seem, and so many apparently obvious absurdities and bewildering paradoxes does it present, that some of the most imaginative students of science refuse to consider it as a practical proposition." (Idrisyn O Evans, "Can We Conquer Time?", Tales of Wonder, 1940)
"We’re free out here, really free for the first time. We’re floating, literally. Gravity can’t bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it’s only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it’s the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream." (Fritz Leiber," The Beat Cluster", 1961)
"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"Science fiction is, very strictly and literally, analogous to science facts. It is a convenient analog system for thinking about new scientific, social, and economic ideas - and for re-examining old ideas." (John W Campbell Jr., "Prologue to Analog", 1962)
"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound. A dimension of sight. A dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into The Twilight Zone." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone", [opening narration] 1963)
"Well it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point. a discontinuity in the curve of life - do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh?" (Thomas Pynehon, "Gravity's Rainbow", 1973)
"The idea of making machines that think has an unfailing fascination, not only for science fiction readers, but for all who can see it is a possible way of gaining some understanding of the working of our own minds. Thinking, however, is not an easily defined phenomenon, although it is often considered to be the process of solving problems." (Edward Ihnatowicz, "The Relevance of Manipulation to the Process of Perception", 1977)
"In the face of all this, many of the standard ideas of science fiction seem to me to pale by comparison. I see the relative absence of these things and the distortions of scientific thinking often encountered in science fiction as terrible wasted opportunities. Real science is as amenable to exciting and engrossing fiction as fake science, and I think it is important to exploit every opportunity to convey scientific ideas in a civilization which is both based upon science and does almost nothing to ensure that science is understood." (Carl Sagan, "Broca's Brain", 1979)
"Thought is a matrix which engenders its own reality. The ideas, concepts, belief-systems that your ancestors trapped have become your trap." (Alfred A Attanasio, "Radix", 1981)
"In every language, from Arabic to Zulu to calligraphy to shorthand to math to music to art to wrought stone, everything from the Unified Field Theory to a curse to a sixpenny nail to an orbiting satellite, anything expressed is a net around some idea." (Richard Bach, "One", 1988)
"The world isn’t fair, the universe isn’t fair. Physics, chemistry and mathematics, they aren’t fair. Or unfair, for that matter. Fairness is an idea, and only conscious creatures have ideas. That’s us. We have ideas about right and wrong. We invent the idea of justice so that we can judge whether something is good or bad. We develop morality. We create rules to live by and call them laws, all to make life more fair." (Iain M Banks, "The Business", 1999)
"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"This possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest of all to accept. [...] The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." (Malcolm T Gladwell, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", 2000)
"To describe how quantum theory shapes time and space, it is helpful to introduce the idea of imaginary time. Imaginary time sounds like something from science fiction, but it is a well-defined mathematical concept: time measured in what are called imaginary numbers. […] Imaginary numbers can then be represented as corresponding to positions on a vertical line: zero is again in the middle, positive imaginary numbers plotted upward, and negative imaginary numbers plotted downward. Thus imaginary numbers can be thought of as a new kind of number at right angles to ordinary real numbers. Because they are a mathematical construct, they don't need a physical realization […]" (Stephen W Hawking, "The Universe in a Nutshell", 2001)
"Science fiction these days is only half a step ahead of science. Astrophysicists and scientists are working in the same way as science fiction writers. They’re working things out in their imagination based on the slim scientific facts that they know. Hawking imagines a black hole and then discovers the mathematics that support his theory, and new possibilities come to light. That’s the imaginative flair that scientists have to have. For me as a sci-fi writer, spinning those ideas in your mind brings you to the point where you dream in science fiction. Suddenly you think of something in the middle of the night, and it’s so vivid you don’t need to write it down because you know you’ll remember it in the morning. That’s what these books, Zero G, reflect: a vivid imagination." (William Shatner, "William Shtner on Sci-Fi, Aging and the Environment", Saturday Evening Post, [interview] 2017)
"All the ideas in the universe can be described by words. Therefore, if you simply take all the words and rearrange them randomly enough times, you’re bound to hit upon at least a few great ideas eventually." (Jarod Kintz, "The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They're Over", 2011)
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