Quotes About Invention

Sturgeon's definition of science fiction—"[a story] which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.

Perhaps we are cursed," Karkasy told the empty fane, "to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves.

There is hardly anything at all. His life is suddenly a large, empty house, with each vacant room waiting to be furnished. His made-up wife. His invented father. His pretend childhood. He wonders if it is possible to unlie yourself.

All these corporations owe their international scale of business to Henry Ford's ingenious, widespread use of the production line.

Fiction is what you get when you rub two things together," I said. Everybody laughed even though I didn't say anything funny.

the year 1790. Computers haven't been invented yet.

But I guess until somebody invents a computer you plug into your head, we'll just have to keep going to school. Bummer in the summer!

Let's say each one of these glue sticks is a wheel

Roman Technology

in 1884, at a shoe store in Vicksburg, a man named Phil Gilbert came up with the idea of selling left and right shoes together in the same box!

invented Pepsi-Cola in New Bern, North Carolina. He called it Brad's Drink at first and changed it to Pepsi-Cola in 1898. Why? Because "dyspepsia" means indigestion, and Pepsi was supposed to calm the stomach.

Today," she said, "we're going to learn about the history of the toilet bowl.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

Smith's procedure is similar to that of ancient pseudepigraphists who, in the words of one scholar, "created something new, an imaginary Sacred Past, the way it should have been.

A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word.

Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.

Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

I invented the pelican, but probably not the acorn or unicorn.

They have an intuitive sense of what I call the "Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation": sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite.

Most inventions and breakthroughs come from reassembling existing ideas in new ways.

Written language, invented by the Greeks around 550 B.C.E., has helped reinforce left hemisphere dominance (at least in the West) and created what Harvard classicist Eric Havelock called "the alphabetic mind."7 So perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the left hemisphere has dominated the game. It's the only side that knows how to write the rules.

The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers, artists, inventors, and designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, and big picture thinkers.

The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius." —SID CAESAR