Quotes About Innovation

Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times

If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped—say with a stone ax—will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier.

But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything that didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

stupid races don't build spaceships!)

Spaceships are for acrobats who are also mathematicians.

A military hierarchy automatically places a premium on conservative behavior and dull conformance with precedent; it tends to penalize original and imaginative thinking. Commodore Arkwright realized that these tendencies are inherent and inescapable; he hoped to offset them a bit by setting up a course that could not be passed without original thinking.

A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic.

Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.

Why it can't be done is not acceptable; I must discover how it can be done.

Don't bang your head against a stone wall." He might add: "Climb over, go around, tunnel under, knock a hole in it—and if nothing works, forget it! Change your plans. Or take a nap. But don't get ulcers.

So what is their crime? Twofold: a) The Shipstone companies are guilty of supplying energy to the human race at prices below those of their competitors; b) They meanly and undemocratically decline to share their industrial secret of the final assembly stage of a Shipstone.

The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better... with hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

I'm electron pusher by trade;

Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein

The Society for Creative Euthanasia

I see. Well—got everything you want?" "Yes," admitted Monroe-Alpha, "unless you should happen to have concealed, somewhere about your person, a hypersphere, a hypersurface, and some four-dimensional liquid, suitable for fine lubrication.

Robert A. Heinlein

I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.

My opinions as to the future of Mankind are hedged in by this statement: I think it is necessary for the human race to establish colonies off this planet. —Admiral Caleb Saunders, interview, Butler, MO, USA, Terra July 7, 1987 ("Anson MacDonald Day") You know the date. Everyone does. Everyone always will. If we're lucky.

Robert A. Heinlein

Sharpie, I thought you liked Star Trek?" "I do. But I've seen five years of it and we've got our own Star Trek now.

Your computers must be three-phase A.C.