Quotes About Innovation

I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order to things.

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.

but an elliptical tower with one gun and two carronades could be built for a fifth of the price,

One was John Moore, who had introduced the Light Infantry to the British army,

In the sinking of the Dorothea, they had seen the future of naval warfare.

With hindsight, Napoleon might have done better to build steam ships

the technology existed.

He could have built a bridge, or a series of floating forts.

He could even have come by air, as individual balloonists already had.

There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.

Technology isn't what makes us "post-human" or "transhuman," as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It's what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.

A polemicist might put it more pointedly: The brighter the software, the dimmer the user.

if, knowing what we know today about the brain's plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet.

It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions.

Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic.

Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they're no more than the delusions of grandeur. What's disturbing about the company's founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such a desire.

We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.

the computer is never a neutral tool. It influences, for better or worse, the way a person works and thinks.

When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image. It not only dissolves the medium's physical form; it injects the medium's content with hyperlinks, breaks up the content into searchable chunks, and surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. All these changes in the form of the content also change the way we use, experience, and even understand the content.

Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.

Google, says its CEO, is more than a mere business; it is a "moral force.

We are soon to have everywhere," wrote one futurist, "smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonators, sterilizers of water, air, food, and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads, and subways.

The Web had turned out to be less the new home of Mind than the new home of Business. The