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[His ideas] were misinterpreted both by those who shared them as well as by those who rejected them.
--
Zbigniew Brzezinski

 

George F. Kennan

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Most of my ideas were rejected and I got used to it. One can get fond of almost anything, even rejection.

 

Tom Baker

 

Economic interdependence does promote shared interests, but it also creates shared vulnerabilities. … In an adversial context, shared interests provide opportunities for exploitation, not mutual gain.

 

Charles A. Kupchan

 

The knowledge of God, the formation of ideas, the mastery of desire and passion, the distinction between that which is to be chosen and that which is to be rejected, all these man owes to his form...

 

Maimonides

 

He (Jasper Johns, fh) and I were each other’s first serious critics. Actually he was the first painter I ever shared ideas with, or had discussions with about painting. No, not the first. Cy Twombly was the first. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy’s direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact. But Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, ‘I’ve got a terrific idea for you, ‘ and then I’d have to find one for him. (remark on his cooperative relation with Jasper Johns, to his biographer Calvin Tomkins)

 

Robert Rauschenberg

 

My apostasy, at the age of nine, was vehement. Clearly, I didn't want the shared words, the shared identity. I forswore chapel; those Bibles were scribbled on and otherwise desecrated, and two or three of them were taken into the back garden and quietly torched.
Later — we were now in Cambridge — I gave a school speech in which I rejected all belief as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was 12: it seemed open-and-shut. I had not pondered Kant's rather lenient remark about the crooked timber of humanity, out of which nothing straight is ever built. Nor was I aware that the soul had legitimate needs.
Much more recently I reclassified myself as an agnostic. Atheism, it turns out, is not quite rational either. The sketchiest acquaintance with cosmology will tell you that the universe is not, or is not yet, decipherable by human beings. It will also tell you that the universe is far more bizarre, prodigious and chillingly grand than any doctrine, and that spiritual needs can be met by its contemplation. Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

 

Martin Amis