Quotes by Inventors - Page 3

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is there reading makes it more.
John Harington
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Pierre Beaumarchais
A house is a machine for living.
Buckminster Fuller
I am long on ideas but short on time. I expect to live only about a hundred years.
Thomas A. Edison
Don't fight forces use them.
Buckminster Fuller
Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress.
Thomas A. Edison
Problems are the price of progress. Don't bring me anything but trouble.
Charles F. Kettering
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
Thomas A. Edison
Peace of mind is that mental condition in which you have accepted the worst.
Lin Yutang
Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do than what one can do.
Lin Yutang
Give me where to stand and I will move the earth.
Archimedes
A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
Steve Jobs
Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence
Arthur C. Clarke
Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.
Arthur C. Clarke
When you go to see the lake, you also see the hippos.
William Kamkwamba
When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece.Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.
Henry Ford
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window
Steve Wozniak
What are you - Secret Service?''If I were, I wouldn't admit it.''And you're not admitting it, I notice.
Robert Goddard
We believe people with Passion CAN change the World for the Better." -Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological
Arthur C. Clarke
If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.
Henry Ford
What I've learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you're hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.
James Dyson
A problem well stated is a problem half solved.
Charles Franklin Kettering
If you want to succeed, get some enemies.
Thomas Edison
If man can live in Manhattan, he can live anywhere.
Arthur C. Clarke
New York is a different country. Maybe it ought to have a separate government. Everybody thinks differently, they just don't know what the hell the rest of the United States is.
Henry Ford
The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.
Alexander Graham Bell
We may have a perfectly adequate way of doing something, but that does not mean there cannot be a better way. So we set out to find an alternative way. This is the basis of any improvement that is not fault correction or problem solving.
Edward de Bono
We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us.
Nikola Tesla
It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
Richard Jordan Gatling
In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-bestscience writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fictionwriter.[dedication to Isaac Asimov from Arthur C. Clarke in his book Report on Planet Three]
Arthur C. Clarke
…mysticism –perhaps the main aberration of the human mind.
Arthur C. Clarke
I'd been rejected, but I was still in love, so I decided to start over.
Steve Jobs
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Steve Jobs
Contentment is the only real wealth
Albert Nobel
I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself: If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town, and we've been together ever since.
Steve Jobs
The day will come when some more powerful man will get fame and riches from my invention, but nobody will believe that poor John Fitch can do anything worthy of attention.
John Fitch
Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.
Rube Goldberg
Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.
Henry Ford
You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense. (1949)
Murray Leinster
In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.
Elon Musk
Our susceptibility to myth is a world danger. Because the application of science to human behaviour has come so late the myth is regarded as less dangerous than the bacillus. It is doubtful whether such a belief is justified.
Goeffrey Pyke
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Chemistry is the dirty part of physics.
Johann Philipp Reis
It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]
William Shockley
Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.
Arthur C. Clarke
It can only be our familiarity with soap bubbles from our earliest recollections, causing us to accept their existence as a matter of course, that prevents most of us from being seriously puzzled as to why they can be blown at all.
C. V. (Charles Vernon) Boys
There is something lamentable, degrading, and almost insane in pursuing the visionary schemes of past ages with dogged determination, in paths of learning which have been investigated by superior minds, and with which such adventurous persons are totally unacquainted. The history of Perpetual Motion is a history of the fool-hardiness of either half-learned, or totally ignorant persons.
Henry Dircks
Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth
Archimedes
Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life.
Steve Jobs
There is a level of consciousness between sleeping and fully wakening when the worries of the day have not settled upon us; the body is stilled, and the senses wholly receptive. If the sun is bright, there is pure silence, or the birds are beginning to sing, this shining level of consciousness can come to be the nearest we will get to paradise this side of our quietus, Every day should begin so, This is no dream. This is the reality. The world outside is beautiful. We do our best to hide it. We cover it. We push it father back. The ugliness we make ourselves. We originate our own worries. We put on our own shackles; build our prisons. We can only glimpse the golden reality, briefly, through our tiny barred windows.
John Wyatt
Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.
R. Buckminster Fuller
The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.
Alfred Nobel
They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin.
Kōbō Abe
We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks… We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies… We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century… A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.
Ray Kurzweil
After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization.
Arthur C. Clarke
Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.
George Eastman
Only photography has been able to divide human life into a series of moments, each of them has the value of a complete existence.
Eadweard Muybridge
Competition is not about fighting, it is all about helping each other to achieve a common goal.
Joey Lawsin
Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity.
Arthur C. Clarke