Every improvement or innovation begins with an idea. But an idea is only a possibility - a small beginning that must be nurtured, developed, engineer, tinkered with, championed, tested, implemented and checked ideas have no value until they are implemented.
All propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas . . . Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.
People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I'll give you an example; I don't read what's handed to me. People say ''Here, here's your speech, or here's an idea for a speech.'' They're changed. Trust me.
What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.
The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.
If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things.
As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.
It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.
Our present political world-view, current in Germany, is based in general on the idea that creative, culture-creating force must indeed be attributed to the state.