Quotes About Innovation

A nation may be moved by its statesmen and defined by its military but it's usually remembered for its artists.

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man.

Ad astra per alia porci (to the stars on the wings of a pig)

Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

He was forever inventing a new way of doing an old thing and doing it better and quicker, but he never in his whole life had any talent for making money.

Samuel smiled at him. "They say man lived in trees one time. Somebody had to get dissatisfied with a high limb or your feet would not be touching flat ground now.

Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything.

I come from a whole goddam family of inventors, said Will. We had ideas for breakfast. We had ideas instead of breakfast. We had so many ideas we forgot to make the money for groceries.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And

You're bound to get ideas if you go thinking' about stuff.

He found that he could communicate his material daydreaming—and, properly applied, that is all advertising is.

Nothing stops, Mac. If you were able to put an idea into effect tomorrow, it would start changing right away.

Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

In 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers selected the Empire State Building as one of the seven greatest engineering achievements in America's history—the only wonder conceived, financed, owned, and managed by private industry.3

It was the Romans who devised the second new structural element—the masonry arch and dome—and used it on a grand scale.

During World War I, Paul Starrett formed Starrett & Goss, which built steamships for the government. By the time Starrett Bros. & Eken was formed in 1922, Paul had already built Macy's to the designs of De Lemos & Cordes; Pennsylvania Station and the Main Post Office to the designs of McKim, Mead & White; and Warren & Wetmore's Biltmore Hotel, where the meeting with the Empire State's directors would decide their fate.

The step from using steel for strengthening masonry to using steel to carry the masonry might not seem enormous, but, as Harvey Wiley Corbett pointed out in The New York Times, Buffington's step was the single most momentous discovery in the history of building since the days of Rome. Architecture was freed from the shackles of stone weight and was made flexible. Buildings

In September 1929, just as the architects were getting down to work on this unprecedented building program, management set a date that seemed unrealistically early—May 1, 1931. That date gave the architects a year and nine months in which to design the building and to oversee its construction.

Stone and wood had been the coin of the building realm until the arrival of cast iron in the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then the weight of buildings had been borne by their walls, but in 1848 James Bogardus used a skeleton of cast-iron posts and beams to support a building from within. Since the walls no longer bore the load, they could be freed from their former obligations.

The idea that finally turned the tide for the architects, the notion that made everything fall in place, was to set the elevators in a central core, which would allow the Empire State Building to provide rentable space that was well lit. From that point forward, they were home free—the solutions were at hand.

Elisha Graves Otis had demonstrated an elevator at the Crystal Palace in 1853 that had a safety device that prevented it from falling if the cable broke.3 In the cast-iron Haughwout Building on Broadway at Broome Street, where china and cutlery were sold, Otis installed the first of his passenger safety-elevators

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.