Quotes About Innovation

Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our destination sooner—getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal

We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius.

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

To him, the world had no order of succession, no causation, no precedent. Everything he saw was new-minted, and thus every day was a parade of wonders.

One mantra of Silicon Valley, the technological innovation capital of the world, is "fail faster to succeed sooner.

Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilise, and then burn the world? There is a March of Science. But who shall beat the drums, for its retreat?

wolf bone was the Stone Age equivalent of a supercomputer.

Once we crack the problem of fusion, we have an assured source of energy for as long as you want to think about it. It will cease to be a reason for war or an influence on foreign affairs.

if history is any guide, a long, long road lies ahead before physicists will be able to tame fusion reactions

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

I don't mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It's like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.

butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker.

Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?

Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.

scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.

Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.

Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.

He looks like the bastard offspring of a multitool and a mangabot.

reach into my travel bag and pull out my hacked Palm computer

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before

Creativity consists of coming up with many ideas, not just that one great idea.

Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to mass unemployment in the long run.