Quotes About Innovation

I could imagine a life in a world maybe a hundred years from now where my ideas and some man's might be the same.

Whenever new knowledge of a transforming nature permeates the race, the standard of world culture rises.

We are indeed seeing in our time the birth of a global superculture that pours together bits and pieces of many different cultures. But it is not just a combination of pieces, and neither will it be merely an homogenization; human beings are far too inventive for that, and the human mind is far too complex. We

I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

Predicting the long-term economics of companies that operate in fast-changing industries is simply far beyond our perimeter.

One of the lessons your management has learned—and, unfortunately, sometimes re-learned—is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.

Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly. Build an eye.

Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky. Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.

Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

ADDENDUM: SOMETIMES THE FUTURE IS BULLSHIT

We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn't make magic carpets work.

an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

If Albert Einstein, the last century's very poster boy for the cunning man and the wild-haired magician of science, knew one thing, then it was simply that there was always more to be known. He didn't pridefully condemn dreams of physics and incomplete theories. He pointed off into the future and named the unknown things as, in fact, spooky action at a distance.

The near future? The future of anything is like some massive weather system on the horizon, pushing out thunderheads all over the place, and it's impossible to predict where the lightning will strike. And in 2011 it's worse than ever.

The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that's how the future always arrives. You don't realize it's here until you bump into it.

Look at a Segway and tell me it's not the world's shittiest witch's broomstick. We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn't make magic carpets work.

Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

the future is a product, and you only get to vote with your money now

The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things.

the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

Okay. I've either reinvented the solar panel or I've made something for seagulls to fuck in.