Quotes About Invention

math always involves both invention and discovery: we invent the concepts but discover their consequences.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.

The actual figure of Pac-Man came about as I was having pizza for lunch. I took one wedge and there it was, the figure of Pac-Man.

If necessity is the mother of invention, drug use is surely its can-do father.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook." He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark."

On the most basic level, agriculture leads to more food; more food leads to more people; more people leads to professional specialization; professional specialization leads to invention; invention leads to the development of greater weapons; the development of greater weapons leads to conquest. What this meant, over the centuries, is that agricultural people basically kicked the shit out of hunters.

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

I chose "Discovery" instead of "Invention" to suggest that science is the way it is not so much because of various adventitious historic acts of invention, but because of the way nature is. With all its imperfections, modern science is a technique that is sufficiently well tuned to nature so that it works—it is a practice that allows us to learn reliable things about the world. In this sense, it is a technique that was waiting for people to discover it.

Shin: a device for finding furniture in the dark.

Perhaps the conspiracy existed only because I had invented it. Perhaps I should forget about it now.

He was inventing the world beyond, peopling it, making them live.

I invented the phrase: "Music not to be listened to." That was my commercial phrase with which I sold Muzak. It was the first music deliberately created to which people were not supposed to listen. It was a new kind of background music. That's why my mother, who was a fine musician, held it in contempt. She wouldn't have it in her apartment. Anybody who knows anything about music holds Muzak in contempt.

Black fungus, white fungus, yellow fungus , blue fungus and so on. Keep inventing bogus fungus to cheat people.

The change needed to restore good feeling cannot be reached by remanding women to the spinning wheel, and the contentment of her grandmother, but by conceding to her every right which the spirit of the age demands. Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

The dictionary tells us that fiction is literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people, is invention or fabrication, as opposed to fact. The dictionary tells us that the imaginary exists only in the imagination. Logic tells us that what exists only in the imagination does not exist in reality, or actuality, which the thesaurus tells us are the same thing.

'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it with a lesson at the end.

The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

I was trying to make something really hard, but then I thought I should make something really soft instead, that could be molded into different shapes. That was how I came up with the first plastic. I called it Bakelite.

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

Mark Zuckerberg did his own software for Facebook, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin made their own for Google.

Paul Allen with Microsoft revolutionized the software industry.

I'm sure we've all had that annoying experience when we desperately need a flashlight, we find one, and the batteries are out. Imagine how much money we would save and the amount of toxins leached into the soil, etc., reduced if we didn't use any batteries in flashlights!

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.