Quotes About Innovation

Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological: it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species, but mostly by economic, political, intellectual, and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom, or education.

Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution;

In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet.

When science has sufficiently ferreted out the forms of things, the world will be merely the raw material of whatever utopia man may decide to make.

As submissive natures unite with masterful individuals to make the order and operation of a society, so the imitative majority follows the innovating minority, and this follows the originative individual, in adapting new responses to the demands of environment or survival. History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Now

science can get along with talent, but art requires genius.

rules were not made for geniuses;

Every topic begins as philosophy, turns to science and ends as art.

Only lunatics can be completely original

One work of genius is worth a thousand commentaries.

The fundamental condition of genius is an abnormal predominance of sensibility and irritability over reproductive power.

What a strange instrument a tuba is. I wonder how many different shapes they twisted that metal into until they realized that a tuba's shape was the exact one they needed to make that exact sound.

Oh, the future--it's always so fucking dated. For you, for me, for all of us. If only there were some way out of it.

our students should be playing Beethoven with research processes, but instead we are hearing Mary Had a Little Lamb.

or concepts the publisher doesn't like) are not as sure to sell as the tried and true. On this, see Brian Martin, The Politics of Research

You have to realize just because things don't have tangible reality, that doesn't mean they don't exist. Ideas are just as real as people and property. Ideas have changed the world profoundly to an extent most people never approach - Father Beale

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

I will not reason and compare my business is to create.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

The difference between a good artist and a bad one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal, the good one really does.

The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.