Food for thought

I was having a discussion with one of my roommates about how he thinks people never learn anything and everything is memorization. We had this talk for a few hours and came to a conclusion. That maybe there are no real original ideas with the amount of people that currently exist there is bound to be many who have the same thoughts and the only difference is if we chose to act on it or not. For instance there was probably many racist like Hitler but never did it but probably had the same idea. Then we came to the notion of if the person who had the cure of all illness had the idea but died with it we would never know. Which lead us into what if everyone did everything they thought of would the world be better or worse. I said it would be better as there would be more advancement. Curious on what others think