Invention Quotes - Page 34

• Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

  Douglas Coupland

  Senior, Long, Toasters

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• But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
  
  Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows;
  
  And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
  
  Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
  
  Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
  
  "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.

  Philip Sidney

  Children, Writing, Heart

  'Astrophel and Stella' (1591) sonnet 1

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• The hope of free people in a frightened world is the values which people put ahead of inventions when their backs are to the wall. These values are beauty, truth, goodness and having a faith, all of which are bombproof.

  Ralph Washington Sockman

  Wall, People, World

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• Necessity may be mother of invention, but fun is the father.

  Alex Faickney Osborn

  Mother, Fun, Father

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• Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Money, Mean, Government

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• Wherever we look in the ancient world the past has been controlled, but nowhere more rigorously than in the history of the Christian church. The methods of control, wherever we find them, fall under three general heads which might be described as (a) the invention, (b) the destruction, and (c) the alteration of documents.

  Hugh Nibley

  Christian, Fall, Power

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• All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

  John Harvey Kellogg

  Science, Simple, Hands

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• You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?

  Marshall McLuhan

  Dad, Men, Media

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, the entire race may migrate from the earth, to settle some vacant and more western planet.... It took but little art, a simple application of natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail of matting, to people the isles of the Pacific, and a little more will people the shining isles of space. Do we not see in the firmament the lights carried along the shore by night, as Columbus did? Let us not despair or mutiny.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Moon, Simple

  "Paradise (to Be) Regained" (1843)

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• Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.

  Carl Sandburg

  Inspirational, Baby, Children

  Carl Sandburg (1948). “Remembrance Rock”

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• As we benefit from the inventions of others, we should be glad to share our own ... freely and gladly.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Benefits, Share, Should

  "It's the little things", www.pbs.org. 2002.

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• Literature is my calling To hold up the mirror to my countrymen comes natural to me; and in the open field of invention I am not without hopes of giving them pleasure.

  T. E. Brown

  Mirrors, Giving, Calling

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• If the Nobel Prize was awarded by a woman, it would go to the inventor of the dimmer switch.

  Kathy Lette

  Nobel, Inventor, Prize

  Kathy Lette (2012). “Altar Ego”, p.309, Random House

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• Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces

  Stefan Zweig

  Hero, Discovery, Conquer The World

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• Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.

  John Major

  Jobs, Dollars, Pounds

  "Major goes back to the old values" by Patrick Wintour and Stephen Bates, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 1993.

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• As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

  Tanith Lee

  Mother, Children, Fairy Stories

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• Of all the inventions that have helped to unify China perhaps the airplane is the most outstanding. Its ability to annihilate distance has been in direct proportion to its achievements in assisting to annihilate suspicion and misunderstanding among provincial officials far removed from one another or from the officials at the seat of government.

  Soong May-ling

  Distance, Airplane, Government

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• I meet the designers very often, we discuss the products, they show me their ideas, we discuss the ad campaigns and every new invention that we can find for the future.

  Bernard Arnault

  Ideas, Campaigns, New Inventions

  "Chairman of LVMH, Bernard Arnault". "Talk Asia" with Lorraine Hahn, www.cnn.com. February 12, 2005.

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• By welcoming eager, talented workers, we expand America's potential for growth, and our competitive culture of invention and possibility.

  Ron Conway

  America, Growth, Culture

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• That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

  Lascelles Abercrombie

  Epic, Needs, Has Beens

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• This is the patent-age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions; Sir Humphrey Davy's lantern, by which coals Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions, Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles, Are ways to benefit mankind, as true, Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.

  Lord Byron

  Science, Soul, Age

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• ...those experiments be not only esteemed which have an immediate and present use, but those principally which are of most universal consequence for invention of other experiments, and those which give more light to the invention of causes; for the invention of the mariner's needle, which giveth the direction, is of no less benefit for navigation than the invention of the sails, which give the motion.

  Francis Bacon

  Science, Light, Giving

  Francis Bacon (1857). “Works of Francis Bacon: 3”, p.363

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• A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.

  Samuel Crompton

  Giving Up, Mean, Eye

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• A nation has a fixed quantity of invention, and it will make itself felt.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Science, Fixed, Quantity

  Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Gosse, Robert Arnot (1904). “The works of Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield: embracing novels, romances, plays, poems, biography, short stories and great speeches”

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• A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Science, Giving, Wish

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