Quotes About Ingenuity

The soviet-controlled economy was horrible and complicated but riddled with loopholes. Everything was scarce; everything was also gettable, if you knew how to get it. We had this system for seventy years said Constantine. People learn to work around the system. The more you cultivate a class of people qho know how to work around the system, the more people you will have qho know how to do it well. All of the Soviet Union for seventy years were people who skilled at working around the system

Once he had identified the new new thing, all he needed was some really smart, passionate engineers to chase after it and make it happen.

The way I solve a hard problem is not to start with the conventional wisdom, but to start over.

He had come from a country where mathematics and mechanics were natural traits. Cars were never destroyed. Parts of them were carried across a village and readapted into a sewing machine or water pump. The backseat of a Ford was reupholstered and became a sofa. Most people in his village were more likely to carry a spanner or screwdriver than a pencil. A car's irrelevant parts thus entered a grandfather clock or irrigation pulley or the spinning mechanism of an office chair.

early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips

No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers

There's something exceptional about watching a video and simultaneously thinking 'That was genius!' and 'I could have done that!'

I don't want anyone to fail, so if you can make money off music even though you can't sing or dance, that's genius.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

Ever since I was a kid, whatever situation I was presented with, I always made the most of it.

Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

Did you know that da Vinci was a painter, polymath, engineer, architect, biologist, and writer all rolled into one? He drew sketches of helicopters at a time when they weren't even invented!

Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.

Serious beliefs are awkward, especially religious ones. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that people's real, heart-felt, deeply held beliefs are, well, 'not easy to handle or deal with, requiring great skill, ingenuity, or care' - in a word, awkward.

The ingenuity and creativity of the private sector is essential to meeting American's needs for a skilled work force.

I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.

I love films that are made with almost no budget.

Invent. I love inventing, that's my first passion.

And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought along a pail for the purpose.

Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But

Realizing they had no clear notion of how far it was from New York to Paris by the great circle route, they went to a public library and measured the distance on a globe with a piece of string. By such means was one of history's greatest planes built.

Most of the best technology that exists on Earth is right here inside us. And everybody takes it almost completely for granted.