Quotes About Innovation

H. Beam Piper

He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination--and taxes."

Dreaming is an act of pure imagination, attesting in all men a creative power, which if it were available in waking, would make every man a Dante or Shakespeare.

The Shape of Things to Come.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

When starting out, don't worry about not having enough money. Limited funds are a blessing, not a curse. Nothing encourages creative thinking in quite the same way.

In business or in life, don't follow the wagon tracks too closely.

Don't delay acting on a good idea. Chances are someone else has just thought of it, too. Success comes to the one who acts first.

Resist telling people how something should be done. Instead, tell them what needs to be done. They will often surprise you with creative solutions.

Spend your time and energy creating, not criticizing. 828

Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is.

Or so Feynman argued: the philosophers themselves, he said, were always a tempo behind, like tourists moving in after the explorers have left.

Wilhelm Johannsen, self-consciously invented the word gene.

It is fitting that history attached Morse's name to his code, more than to his device.

Human computers had no future, he saw:

The potential application of a piece of pure thought can never be predicted

So by 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States.

He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness, to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys.

Weather forecasting was the beginning but hardly the end of the business of using computers to model complex systems.

logarithmic tables as cheap as potatoes"—

It makes my head explode when there are people who think you can do everything in HTML.