Quotes About Innovation

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos;

partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind.

have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations.

These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation.

Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery if I could banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.

new species would bless me as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.

I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Art is an explosion.

fortochka. It is a tiny window cut inside a larger pane. Even when windows have been sealed for the long winter, the fortochka can remain in use, being opened regularly to allow air to circulate. The Soviet university, as it turned out, had its fortochkas, and the way to learn was to hunt for them and then to stick your whole face in them and breathe the fresh air as though one's lungs could be filled up with reserve supplies.

Why not - is a slogan for an interesting life.

You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins

There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology.

Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.

The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.

Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits. For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When

Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour.

Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation; while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all.

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.

The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen.