Inventor Quotes - Page 14

• To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

  Ray Dolby

  Anxiety, Darkness, Answers

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• I was a fixer, a builder - an inventor - ever since I can remember.

  Tom Scholz

  Remember, Fixers, Builder

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• I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate

  Dennis Ritchie

  Fate, Definitions, Matter

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• The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Twitter post from Jan 30, 2017

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• Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

  Steven Johnson

  Innovation, Batteries, Radio

  "Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From". www.wired.com. September 27, 2010.

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• The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands.The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Education, Creativity, Artist

  Daniel H. Pink (2006). “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future”, p.14, Penguin

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• After all the allowances are made for the necessity of having a few supermen in our midst - explorers, conquerors, great inventors, great presidents, heroes who change the course of history - the happiest man is still the man of the middle class who has earned a slight means of economic independence, who has done a little, but just a little, for mankind and who is slightly distinguished in his community, but not too distinguished.

  Lin Yutang

  Hero, Mean, Men

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• Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.

  Jonathan Swift

  Father, Lying, Devil

  Jonathan Swift (2011). “Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings”, p.558, Bantam Classics

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• There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected with the desire to become somebody. Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be- musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors- but "somebody": to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring not quiet and self-fulfillment, but self-glorification and self-expansion

  Anthony de Mello

  Children, Powerful, Ambition

  Anthony De Mello (2011). “The Way to Love: Meditations for Life”, p.73, Image

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• Shortly after the birth control pill was approved for public distribution, one woman wrote to John Rock, its inventor, "You should be afraid to meet your maker." Rock, despite being Catholic replied, "My dear Madam, in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions."

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Rocks, Catholic, Taught

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• People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

  John Thomas Sladek

  People, Great Inventors, Laughed

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• What is called economic progress is the joint effect of the activities of the three progressive groups-or classes-of the savers, the scientist-inventors, and the entrepreneurs, operating in a market economy as far as it is not sabotaged by the endeavors of the nonprogressive majority of the routinists and the public policies supported by them.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Class, Entrepreneur, Progress

  Ludwig Von Mises (1962). “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method”

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• I am not what I would consider truly a musician. I am an inventor. I am an innovator.

  Kanye West

  Musician, Innovators

  "Kanye West: In His Own Words". www.papermag.com. April 20, 2015.

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• Old or new, the only sign I always try to rid my books of (usually with little success) is the price-sticker that malignant booksellers attach to the backs. These evil white scabs rip off with difficulty, leaving leprous wounds and traces of slime to which adhere the dust and fluff of ages, making me wish for a special gummy hell to which the inventor of these stickers would be condemned.

  Alberto Manguel

  Rip, Book, White

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.22, Vintage Canada

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• Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it.

  Henry Jacob Bigelow

  Failure, Character, Successful

  "Surgical Anaesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers". Pp. 369-370. Book by Henry Jacob Bigelow, 1894.

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• The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

  Charles Kettering

  Jobs, Work, Failure

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• The liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology. It's a blueprint for inventing inventors.

  Donald Sadoway

  Technology, Stories, Liquid

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• Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.

  Joshua Reynolds

  Memories, Creativity, Innovation

  sir Joshua Reynolds (1853). “Discourses on the Fine Arts Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy”, p.7

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• Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Inspirational, Wise, Wisdom

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• We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871”, p.340, University of Georgia Press

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• Inventors don't have time for married life.

  Nikola Tesla

  Married, Married Life

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• Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  "Thomas Alva Edison : Sixty Years of an Inventor's Life". Book by Francis Arthur Jones, 1908.

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• O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, O skilled to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Time, Names, Voice

  'Northern Farmer. New Style' (1869) st. 5

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• The rule in our society is that while those who kill once make wretched a single person are severely punished, those (heads of state, inventors, manufacturers) who are responsible for the death, mutilation or general wretchedness of thousands or millions are rewarded with fame, riches and prizes... If you are going to rob, rob big; if you're going to kill, kill big.

  Philip Slater

  Politics, Our Society, Riches

  Philip Slater (2016). “The Pursuit of Loneliness: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal”, p.142, Beacon Press

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• Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.

  Horace Mann

  Education, Mean, Science

  Horace Mann (1957). “The Republic and the School: The Education of Free Men”

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