Quotes About Invention

Technologist Kevin Kelly suggests, "If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology, . . . then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google's search engine and the iPod. They are something useful produced by a mind.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

Steve Jobs was quoted in Business Week as saying "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Washing machines, vacuums, drills, pumps, and electric fans, among other things, are still powered by Tesla's perambulatory insight.

Sometimes I wish someone would invent a pill so David'd wake up one morning without autism, like someone waking from a long coma, and he'd say, "Jeez, Catherine, where have I been?

By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.

gunpowder, made from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and carbon.

Sono gli impiegati che inventano, in fin dei conti, tutte queste scartoffie [i passaporti] per avvelenare la vita agli uomini, e le loro disposizioni non vanno prese troppo sul serio.

Every year somebody invents something new — some new devilish machine to make our lives a burden

Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.

We have made many glass vessels... with tubes two cubits long. These were filled with mercury, the open end was closed with the finger, and the tubes were then inverted in a vessel where there was mercury.

One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.

I love to see technology from a design perspective and vice versa. I am a 'Desigineer.'

I know people think I invented the Victoria sandwich, but I'm really not that old.

When I was a child, one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother - a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now... and now we're in Egyptian times, and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.'

In 1968 when I was in high school I built a four-foot-tall remote control robot with pneumatic cylinders that operated his hands. My robot won first place at a science competition at the University of Alabama where my high school was the only African-American school represented. That was a huge moral victory.

I love video games. I'm also slightly in awe of them. I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before.

For me, inventing video games was just one successful thing I had done among many others.

Video games are engineered now, but the step I am trying to take, no one can engineer.

I just don't see the point of not eating cheese. I mean, if God didn't want us to eat cheese, would he have let man invent it?

It was an octopus with one eye. A Cyclops octopus. I'd call it a cyclopoctopus until a better name came along.

memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part pure invention.

Let's agree right here at the outset that memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part pure invention.

Let's agree right here at the outset that memory is made up of one part perception, one part intuition, and one part pure invention.