Quotes About Innovation

I'll go see what's in the building," she said. "Maybe it's somebody like me, somebody smarter who knows about electricity. Tomorrow morning I'll go see.

But ingenuity is often indistinguishable from foolish play, and foolish play is one of those traits I find most endearing about humanity.

carrying Apples—anti-personnel lasers—

What did heartbroken people do before phones? Come home and stare at the mailbox? Stand in their driveway and wait for the stagecoach? Run to the Western Union to see if anyone had Morse Coded them? Stare into the sky waiting for the messenger pigeon?

One of those useless machines they used to make," he finally began, "was called an MRI.

Russia's most prominent military scientist noted that Desert Storm showed that terms like "front lines" and "flanks," and the idea that winning a war means occupying enemy territory, were no longer relevant.

Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.

Nobody can test an idea before taking the trouble to have an idea.

catch me with an unexpected result

the land of ideas, you are always renting.

For Shackleton, self-promotion had been essential all the way. He had paid all his expenses with media tie-ins, one way or another: auctioning off news and picture rights before he left, taking special postage stamps along to be franked at the south pole. After he made it, his bestseller had nine translations. He spruced up his expedition ship into a museum and charged admission.

Gregory Benford

Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion.

Killeen had potted a Snout that carried edible foods for its organic parts. They had both stuffed themselves with the greasy goo.

English officer came striding across the field quite deliberately. He stopped, saluted with a ramrod spine, and said, "Arthur Clarke. I gather you're the men who brought us those superbombs. I'd like to shake your hands." Karl found him an agreeable fellow, a bit younger and brimming with ideas.

As a very young writer - kindergarten through about fifth grade - I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the 'Guinness Book of World Records.'

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.

Wealth today has been created by a world view dominated by fast-moving networks, open information, bottom-up entrepreneurialism.

Class I to XII wasn't much help; I was always a mediocre student. But when I pursued higher education and studied economics with theatre or psychology with science fiction, I got a whole new world view.

How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?

If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.

Pesticides came about after the first world war. Some brainy petrochemical money maker said, 'Hey, that mustard gas worked great on people, maybe we could dilute it down and spray it on our crops to deal with pests.'

Until the late 1950s Britain's leaders were slow to appreciate the social and economic value of motorways. The first stretch of German Autobahn had opened before the first world war, as did the first highway in the U.S. Other countries followed suit in the inter-war years.

From the American Revolution right up to the Second World War, the U.S. was more likely to provoke suspicion among members of the British establishment than deferential approval. It was seen - with good cause - not just as a potential rival for empire, but also as dangerously egalitarian, worryingly innovatory, and excessively democratic.