Quotes About Innovation

British Interplanetary Society.

We can be sure of talent; We can only pray for genius

Miraculous though they were—perhaps the supreme triumph of the science that had produced them—they were the creations of a sick culture, a culture that had been afraid of many things.

Lo que la naturaleza puede hacer, también el hombre lo hace, a su modo.

We obtained another guinea pig, chloroformed it, and sent it through the transmitter. To our delight, it revived. We immediately had it killed and stuffed for the benefit of posterity. You can see it in the museum with the rest of our apparatus.

A fin-de-siècle philosopher had once remarked—and been roundly denounced for his pains—that Walter Elias Disney had contributed more to genuine human happiness than all the religious teachers in history. Now, half a century after the artist's death, his dreams were still proliferating across the Florida landscape.

magnetohydrodynamic

Arthur C. Clarke

The Man Who Ploughed the Sea First published in Satellite, June 1957 Collected in Tales from the White Hart This story was written in Miami, in 1954. Despite the lapse of time, many of the themes of this story are surprisingly up-to-date, and a few years ago I was amazed to read a description in a scientific journal of a ship-borne device to extract uranium from sea water! I sent a copy of the story to the inventors, and apologised for invalidating their patent.

Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.

When, taking all factors into account, anything can be proved to be impossible, that usually means that it will be done in some different manner and employing a new and unforeseen technique.

Dear Mr Jinx: I'm afraid your idea is not at all original. Stories about writers whose work is always plagiarised even before they can complete it go back at least to H. G. Wells's 'The Anticipator'. About once a week I receive a manuscript beginning:

It was a non-Hermian joke that any child who showed signs of interest in art, philosophy, or abstract mathematics was plowed straight back into the hydroponic farms.

Oh yes, we once tried to put this thick catsup in a wide-mouth bottle so it would pour easily, and the company almost went broke—the American housewife refused to touch it because the shape of the container had been changed. It has taken us fifteen years to enlarge the neck of the bottle by one quarter of an inch.

seem quaint and archaic.

A man may take one step ahead of his culture and chance being called a genius. But if he takes two steps, he is certain to be called a menace, a madman, a fool.

But to me, MAP was a robot Columbus.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible

once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…

Like his great influence H.G. Wells, Clarke was a futurist and an ad astra guy, an inventor of Telstar twenty years before the engineers had the material to enact his plan.

Clarke's Law—"any increasingly complex technology will look like magic"—signified the undertow which in the Age of Limbaugh

The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.