How many people have noticed that people saying this assume it is a good idea? Nazis had ideas too and a lot of them got killed.
Besides who says you cannot kill an idea? For that matter why is that necessarily important? All that is needed is for the idea not to bother anyone.
And if an idea was killed would it be remembered? Or does being killed just refer to all the ideas no one believes anymore?
Edited by jatay3
Lord of the Blue Star
I would like to propose a minor name change to this trope. Grammatically as it stands "You can not kill an idea" means that "it is possible to not kill an idea." The tone and meaning of the trope would better represented by "You cannot kill an idea" which means "it is impossible to kill an idea." The space between "can" and "not" drastically changes the meaning of the phrase and including it aims for a meaning different than what this trope means.
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Claim: The Party in 1984 "is not dependent on anything other than the ideas and methods of the Party meaning that it can never be destroyed by taking out any one individual or place." Actually, the Party depends most on keeping itself in political power, though it pulls that off superlatively. Its ideology is mostly a secondary development, the purpose being to safeguard the dictatorship.
"Martyrs, like Jesus, are one of the reasons why Christianity flourished, since while Jesus himself died The Proto-Christian cultists who became The Remnant and the later Early Christians kept the ideology alive using the story of his life and his teachings until Emperor Constantine I attributed his victory in a battle to Christianity, which was the big turning point, albeit at the expense of pre-existing religions."
Worshipping Caesar is also an idea.
In fact most of the ideas described in the Real Life section are ideas that other ideas should be killed.