Quotes About Innovation

Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That's why we are science fiction writers, not scientists.

Coffee and humanity both sprang from the same area in eastern Africa. What if some of those early ape-men nibbled on the bright red berries? What if the resulting mental stimulation opened them up to a new way of looking at old problems, much as it did Europeans? Could this group of berry nibblers be the Missing Link, and that memory of the bright but bitter-tasting fruit be the archetype for the story of the Garden of Eden?

I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel, it needs to be hybridised.

An empty page. A new story waiting for a thought, a hint, a desire.

Taparak is a city of silicon and stone, shaped as if by an artist's hands. It was my home too, in the beginning.

My city could not help but be conducive to creative thought. Who knows what new myths might spring from the juxtaposition of so many fabulous designs?

You're here mainly because I hate to see waste. I like to create. I like to repair.

From a crude rocket in a weedy field to Explorer and beyond, the human race had broken the bonds of gravity to which they had been chained since the beginning of time.

history itself arises out of the adjacent possible.

Some say that we should stop exploring space, that the cost in human lives is too great. But Columbia's crew would not have wanted that. We are a curious species, always wanting to know what is over the next hill, around the next corner, on the next island. And we have been that way for thousands of years.

Play allows us to develop alternatives to violence and despair....

The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a challenge and opportunity beyond imagination.

Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.

The handful of leading craftsmen turning out pianos during that time produced only around thirty to fifty of them per annum. But by 1798, piano maker James Shudi Broadwood could barely keep up with demand, writing to a wholesaler, "Would to God we could make them like muffins!

Oscar is our Liszt and Bill Evans is our Chopin,

But in a fit of inspiration he'd fashioned a balaclava from a Tesco carrier bag – the handles tied beneath his chin.

But there was a difference between being bright and possessing those sparks of ideas that lead to original thought.

The human brain is a most unusual instrument of elegant and as yet unknown capacity.

Humans need to be a little crazy, spontaneous, unusual, free-flowing, and creative.

The new idea is here: Control is very old-fashioned, and our societies will change gradually as people come to see that the old system just doesn't work. I

I invented the phrase: "Music not to be listened to." That was my commercial phrase with which I sold Muzak. It was the first music deliberately created to which people were not supposed to listen. It was a new kind of background music. That's why my mother, who was a fine musician, held it in contempt. She wouldn't have it in her apartment. Anybody who knows anything about music holds Muzak in contempt.

blind obedience is never good for a civilization because when people stop thinking, it kills progress.