Quotes About Innovation

Language is a work of astonishing creativity. It is by far the most magnificent artefact humanity has ever come up with. It even surpasses the movies of Mel Gibson in this respect.

It is a mistake to say something cannot be done simply because you don't know how to do it.

Life is the future, not the past.

Then you understand the wide range of the totally new and unexpected creations they can sometimes come up with. Most people's minds travel along the same road traveled by everyone else, never straying off the route of conventional wisdom. Makers know no such boundaries. They have a rare ability to make their own roads of thought. Their minds venture through the wilderness of all that exists, combining random bits of knowledge in ways that have never been imagined before.

If an idea was sound, it had to have a life beyond a leader, or the leader had failed.

he had created a solution where it had never before existed, or even been imagined.

That's a maker," Isidore said. "That's the way they are. Creativity in large and small ways defines their nature in everything they do.

Create a better idea of what the key should be. One that makes more sense to people, so that they believe in the diversion we create.

You don't have to get wet to cross a river.

The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

Even a really bad creator would at least have started with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Surprise.

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, 'But we've always done it this way.' A million dead people can't have been wrong, can they?

It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done. A person ignorant of the possibility of failure can be a half-brick in the path of the bicycle of history.

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

The second mouse gets the cheese!

Never promise to do the possible. Anyone could do the possible. You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible.

People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious.

Then the Dean repeated the mantra that has had such a marked effect on the progress of knowledge throughout the ages. "Why don't we just mix up absolutely everything and see what happens?" he said. And Ridcully responded with the traditional response. "It's got to be worth a try," he said.

It was impossible for him to get bored. He just didn't have the imagination.