Quotes About Innovation

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules

There is a notion that creative people are absentminded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether.

Neither is it possible to control, or regulate, the machinery of creativity.

To be a truly great artist, you must learn to combine your observations with your imagination.

People think I am trying to keep my ideas a secret, said Leonardo. But, in truth, I am left-handed, and when I write normally from left to right, I smear ink across the page. One day I realized that if I wrote backward, I would not be so messy. (p. 62)

a great artist has to combine observation with imagination. (p. 78)

Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman.

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that's braver than it sounds.

I guess I feel the same way about being a corpse. Why lie around on your back when you can do something interesting and new, something useful?

Upon the occasion of history's first manned flight - in the 1780's aboard the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloons - someone asked Franklin what use he saw in such frivolity. What use, he replied, is a newborn baby?

This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T

It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking. Is cutting the organs out of a dead man and stitching them into someone else barbaric and disrespectful, or is it a straightforward operation to save multiple lives? Does crapping into a Baggie while sitting 6 inches away from your crewmate represent a collapse of human dignity or a unique and comic form of intimacy?

Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years.

He will be lowered into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen. From here he will progress to the second chamber, where either ultrasound waves or mechanical vibration will be used to break his easily shattered self* into small pieces, more or less the size of ground chuck. The pieces, still frozen, will then be freeze-dried and used as compost for a memorial tree or shrub, either in a churchyard memorial park or in the family's yard.

The question then becomes, was it necessary, once the likes of Vesalius had pretty much figured out the basics, for every student of anatomy to get right in there and figure them out all over again? Why couldn't models and preserved prosections be used to teach anatomy? Do gross anatomy labs reinvent the wheel? The questions were especially relevant in Knox's day, given the way in which bodies were procured, but they are still relevant today.

One of the things I love about manned space exploration is that it forces people to unlace certain notions of what is and isn't acceptable. And possible. It's amazing what sometimes gets accomplished via an initially jarring but ultimately harmless shift in thinking.

One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as "the rear passage." A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris.

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a

technologists sometimes exploit the synergy between the two. By adding strawberry or vanilla—aromas we associate with sweetness—it's possible to fool people into thinking a food is sweeter than it really is. Though sneaky, this is not necessarily bad, because it means the product can contain less added sugar. Which

What can be done for these men? A lot. The art of phalloplasty—crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient's body—has come a long way (thanks in no small part to the transgender community).

Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.

Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you.

tried to reenliven mealtimes by hiring a quartette to sing "The Chewing Song,"† an original Kellogg composition