Quotes About Ingenuity

Some ways of using our thinking are really inspiring. There are people who use their thinking to race cars. People use their thinking to build rockets to the moon. It's all just a use of your thinking.

My principal professional objective is to introduce intelligence as the ubiquitous utility. I'd like to be the Thomas Edison of intelligence.

I did the utility thing at first out of necessity to find a place on the team.

Well, I'm rather attracted to rather prosaic things like vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. Where people haven't apparently made them with a great love for what they're doing.

My sense is that you can make a film under almost any circumstances. As long as someone has a vague idea of what he's doing, something distinctive will emerge. That, to me, is what film making is all about.

I'm a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

An artist looks at a juice bottle, an egg carton, or a newspaper and sees something valuable in them.

Every decently-made object, from a house to a lamp post to a bridge, spoon or egg cup, is not just a piece of 'stuff' but a physical embodiment of human energy, testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty.

We have to understand in value what the services of nature are so that we can understand that degrading them is an irreplaceable resource that no amount of money or human ingenuity can replace.

New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat. Protein

Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention's mother.

It was loopholery at its very best.

Most people thought you just waved your hands and sim-sallah-bim, but it was a lot more complex than that. Sorcery was not so much doing what you wanted to do but doing what you could do—or ingeniously finding a way around the physical limitations of the craft.

Guerrilla marketers do not rely on the brute force of an outsized marketing budget. Instead, they rely on the brute force of a vivid imagination.

It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.

The knack is art.

I still can't believe that animals don't understand why delicious food is in such a ridiculous spot.

I tried to build an igloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved.

People in Ember rarely threw anything away. They made the best possible use of what they had.

People had figured it out once, she thought. They could figure it out again.

She knew how to get by on next to nothing.

Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She spread the mixture onto two slices of Wonder bread, then rolled each slice into a cylinder and passed

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.