Linus Pauling — "The only way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones …"
The only way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas and throw the bad ones away.
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More from Linus Pauling
"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
"I am not a quack. I am a scientist."
"If there were nobody in the world but politicians, I would feel that there was no hope for mankind, no hope for civilization, no hope for the world."
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Details
Attributed, often cited as a general principle of his scientific method.
Date: Unknown, likely mid-20th century
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Creative output depends on volume. You cannot reliably produce one brilliant idea by thinking carefully once — instead, generate ideas freely and in large numbers, then ruthlessly evaluate and discard the weak ones. Quality emerges through filtering, not from cautious initial thinking. This challenges the myth of lone-genius inspiration, replacing it with a systematic process that treats ideation as raw material requiring refinement.
Relevance to Linus Pauling
Pauling embodied prolific intellectual output across chemistry and beyond. He proposed major theoretical frameworks — resonance structures, electronegativity scales, the alpha helix — knowing most would require revision. His vitamin C megadose advocacy, though later disputed, showed the same willingness to champion bold hypotheses. Winning two Nobel Prizes in unrelated fields reflects a mind that generated ideas across domains and refined rather than restrained them.
The era
The mid-20th century was science's most productive era: Cold War competition poured unprecedented funding into research, brainstorming was formalized as a workplace methodology by Alex Osborn in 1953, and laboratory teams replaced the solo inventor model. Scientific progress depended on generating competing hypotheses rapidly. This made Pauling's framing — volume first, judgment second — not just philosophical but operationally true for how innovation actually functioned.
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