Quotes About Invention

To give herself a measure of credible autonomy, she had decided to invent a husband. Then, in a subsequent flash of inspiration, she had just as quickly killed him off.

In his mind's eye, he saw his dream of a new life drifting away like a lost balloon. And for some time he sat there, hating to see it go. But then it was gone, and he began to invent a new dream, and he began to feel better.

These turbines had been invented by a man named Ledroptha Curtain, who, as a young scientist, had published impressive papers on a wide variety of topics—everything from tidal energy to mapping the brain—until abruptly the papers stopped. No one heard from him for many years. Then one day he reappeared and founded the Institute, apparently having turned his genius to matters of education. There

WHOSE IDEA WAS IT TO LET YOU HAVE PAPER AND INK?

The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society....—George Steiner, After Babel

I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural

if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account.

Technology = Leverage Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology.

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it.

If you look at history, it seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough.

The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It's that it tends not to happen at all. It's only when you're deliberately looking for hard problems, as a way to use speed to the greatest advantage, that you take on this kind of project. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass. It is, as Edison said, one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Without the incentive of wealth, no one wants to do it.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist.

A scientist, an artist, a citizen is not like a child who needs papa methodology and mama rationality to give him security and direction; he can take care of himself, for he is the inventor not only of laws, theories, pictures, plays, forms of music, ways of dealing with his fellow man, institutions but also of entire world views, he is the inventor of entire forms of life.

Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, I went there---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- and it wasn't like that. I say, Because I am not you.

What he liked best was taking things apart, even books, even the Bible. He said the Bible was like an owner's guide, a repair manual to an unfinished invention. He also said the Bible was a wilderness. It was one of Father's theories that there were parts of the Bible the no one had ever read, just as there were parts of the world where no one had ever set foot.

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck

Since there was no longer a horizon towards which to rush, they would invent fake ones - substitute horizons.

By the way, who invented Peace?

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.

Si inventer la substance, c'est indirectement inventer l'accident, plus l'invention est puissant, performante, et plus l'accident est dramatique.

I have a gift for inventing fantasies with extraordinary speed.