Quotes About Innovation

Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du NOUVEAU! (rough translation : Into the abyss -- Heaven or Hell, what difference does it make? / To the depths of the Unknown to find the NEW!)

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

Bad taste makes more millionaires than good taste.

there must be a way. surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of. who put this brain inside of me? it cries it demands it says that there is a chance. it will not say no.

did you ever consider that lsd and color TV arrived for our consumption around the same time? Here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other.

People lack originality.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate

I agree that complacency hardly engenders an immortal literature but neither does repetition.

But before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with.

Vaya sorpresa que te vas a llevar, amigo... ¡cuando descubras que nosotros los viejos retrógrados queremos también un mundo mejor! ¡sólo que no somos partidarios de QUEMAR la casa para librarnos de las termitas!

how to do it" will never create an Art, it will never shake the old skin, it will never get us out of here.

Maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.

then came the manual typewriter. then the electric typer. and now this. it's as if I have been reborn.

The Wizard and the Prophet is a book about the way knowledgeable people might think about the choices to come, rather than what will happen in this or that scenario. It is a book about the future that makes no predictions.

think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.

By the end of the first millennium A.D., Wari techniques had reclaimed more than a million acres of cropland from mountainsides that almost anywhere else would have been regarded as impossibly dry, steep, and cold.

To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world—the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky—are to be embraced, not feared.

Today, about 85 percent of Israel's wastewater—more than 100 million gallons a year—is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.

Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance. By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods.

Felling a single four-foot tree with an indigenous stone axe would take 115 hours—nearly three weeks of eight-hour days. With a steel axe, workers could topple the same tree in less than three hours.

Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon as they encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was staggering