Quotes About Invention

I was still struggling to invent an alternate version of myself, someone proud and unflinching who could gaze levelly at his father and tell him his last secrets. I wanted him to know me; to have seen me. I'd been waiting until I was settled and fulfilled, so as to present myself in terms of a happiness he might understand.

Entrepreneurship is, first of all, the power to create.

All good inventions come from something personal," she said. "People create things because it's personal.

People like Justin Frankel and Daniel Sheldon linger on the fringe until they dream up something that has great commercial potential. Then some big company swoops in and buys them, or they give birth to the big company themselves.

to Clark's way of thinking, the big distinction wasn't between "work" and "play" but between "creating new technology for money" and "creating new technology for pleasure.

Engineers created the wealth. And during the 1990s Silicon Valley had created a fantastic amount of new wealth.

After Sencer—or after Foege—the CDC's relationship to disease control had changed in ways that eliminated its need for bravery. It had begun a descent. It had replaced the flowers on its porch with fake ones and hoped no one would notice. But people did notice, at least those who came close to the porch. Rajeev Venkayya had seen things that caused him to exclude the CDC from playing a role in the invention of pandemic planning.

It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what's in them must be invented." What

Someone once said that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clark now had the best magic act in Silicon Valley. The best magic act attracted many of the best engineers. In the Valley it often did. The Valley had given engineers a place where they could make their living outside the enormous gray corporations that expected them to conform. It

Clark had invented the technology, bet his career on it, and been right. He had attracted the most talented engineers in Silicon Valley to his company, and they in turn created the most talented computers.

male astronauts had been fitted with condom catheters, but these were always threatening to leak or even burst and obviously wouldn't work for women. To everyone's relief, a NASA engineer created an extra-absorbent polymer and worked it into a diaper that could be worn by all. (In the bargain he'd anticipated

You can't have made-up things in made-up stories. But in real life, you can.

Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He was a great believer in exercising his mind and the minds of his workers and felt that without a quota he probably wouldn't have achieved very much. His personal invention quota was a minor invention every ten days and a major invention every six months. To Edison, an idea quota was the difference between eating beefsteak or a plateful of Black Beauty stew.

Instead of presenting a catalog of all known creative techniques and abandoning you to puzzle out which ones actually work, I started with the ideas (fish) and worked backwards to each creator (fisherman). Then I identified the technique that caught the idea.

I thought Chaos all howling, random creativity," said Corum. "This is worse." "It is what becomes of a place when Chaos exhausts its invention," Jhary told him. "Ultimately, Chaos brings a more profound stagnation than anything it despises in Law. It must forever seek more and more sensation, more and more empty marvels, until there is nothing left and it has forgotten what true invention is.

People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.

as if Morphy had invented a great philosophical profundity on his way to the opera. That happens, of course, when you are not looking at yourself too carefully.

He was an autodidact, and he believed his mind could read the motives and spirit behind any invention. He had immediately invented the pocket shirt, which allowed fuzes and gadgets to be stored easily by a working sapper.

Ever since Hiroshima, we've been faced with the depressing fact that you cannot un-invent something.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.

Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?

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!

I figured out how to put basically the functionality of an M.R.I. machine - a multimillion-dollar M.R.I. machine - into a wearable in the form of a ski hat.