Edwin Land Quotes - Page 2

...from this day forward until the day you are buried, do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight, and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day.

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.

If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.

If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved.

There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.

The world belongs to the articulate.

The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.

An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.

We took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren't particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren't hard.

Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.

As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.

[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.

I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it.

We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.

In this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.

The world is like a fertile field that's waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.

I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.