Quotes About Innovation

the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people's problems. It is 'best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions to problems in a similar way to how evolution works in nature. Some solutions are "fitter" than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die.

If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain and the United States made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. 'The industrialised nations whose governments invested least in science did best economically,' says Kealey, 'and they didn't do so badly in science either.

Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty

The free thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Scientists now tell us that evolution has been supplanted on this planet by culture. Human culture moves at so rapid a pace that it has far outrun and outstripped the natural processes of change and adaptation. This

how can conceptual worlds, different material practices, along variously restrained or absolutely rude interdisciplinary dynamics be satisfactorily brought together in a way that seeks not to develop a necessarily unifying framework, but to hold in its hands for a few moments an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo?

New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change, Betsy decided profoundly.

This pool is a triumph of imagination. That's how you win at life, Gin. You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can't be done. There's always a solution, even if it's weird.

QUESTION EVERYTHING; STAND BACK, I'M GOING TO TRY SCIENCE!; I REJECT YOUR REALITY AND SUBSTITUTE MY OWN.

People always say they can't do things, that they're impossible. They just haven't been creative enough.

You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can't be done, even if it's weird.

To her, majoring in painting was an act of insanity akin to majoring in photocopying or reheating leftovers

That's how you win at life. You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can't be done, there's always a solution, even if it's weird.

Dagny, he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He knew what he saw, what he thought and what he wanted. He did not say, 'It seems to me,' and he did not take orders from those who say, 'In my opinion.

Rearden. He didn't invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn't have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it's his? Why does he think it's his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?

If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them, animals perish— man writes the Constitution of the United States.

Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood the cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men! -Equality 7-2521

Nathaniel Taggart had been a penniless adventurer who had come from somewhere in New England and built a railroad across a continent, in the days of the first steel rails. His railroad still stood; his battle to build it had dissolved into a legend, because people preferred not to understand it or to believe it possible.

Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.