Great Inventions Quotes & Sayings

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men ... One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs - not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can "be", that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves. — Rollo May

Community colleges are one of America's great social inventions a gateway to the future for first time students looking for an affordable college education, and for mid-career students looking to get ahead in the workplace. — Barbara Mikulski

We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary. — Agatha Christie

You of the West are practical in business, practical in great inventions, but we of the East are practical in religion. You make commerce your business; we make religion our business. — Swami Vivekananda

Most people who die in fires don't burn to death; they die from smoke inhalation that kills the respiratory system. that's why the fire service is going on and on about smoke detectors. These little ten-dollar gadgets are one of the truly wonderful inventions of man. The wake you up from a deep slumber so that you and your family and your dog or cat or whatever can get out of the house in time to live and call the fire department. If this sounds like a public service announcement, it is. If you don't have one, buy one today. They make great Christmas gifts. Plus they're cheap. Give a gift of love to a loved one you love. End of announcement. — Larry Brown

Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best — Thomas A. Edison

Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks. — James D. Watson

They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and Jose Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and Colonel Aureliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes, and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long. — Carl Sagan

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. — Henry David Thoreau

A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library ... witho ut cost to the reader. — Lawrence Clark Powell

I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho to-day-Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical, will be on the wing, bandy'd like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprizon'd in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump'd, and bruised along the King's high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever! — Erasmus Darwin

There have been three great inventions since the beginning of time: fire, the wheel, and central banking. — Will Rogers

Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions as it were by the way, in the course of their everyday life. — Elizabeth Charles

The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty. — Samuel Smiles

There is first the problem of acquiring content, which is learning. There is another problem of acquiring learning skills, which is not merely learning, but learning to learn, not velocity, but acceleration. Learning to learn is one of the great inventions of living things. It is tremendously important. It makes evolution, biological as well as social, go faster. And it involves the development of the individual. — Ralph W. Gerard

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Have you ever noticed that things that don't kill you make you weaker? And great minds don't think alike. If they did, the patent office would only have about fifty inventions. I started getting suspicious when I cried over spilt milk and the cashier took it off my bill. - Wally — Scott Adams

And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Aesop makes the fable, that when he died he told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried under the ground in his vineyard: and they digged over the ground, gold they found none, but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man's life. — Francis Bacon

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit. — Richard Flanagan

The great sexual energy that one has on abstinence can be transformed into art, poetry, dance, and inventions. — Girdhar Joshi

All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn't all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it's reinterpreted in an unexpected way. Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation. — Scott Belsky

ALL religions of a spiritual nature are inventions of man. He has created an entire system of gods with nothing more than his carnal brain. Just because he has an ego, and cannot accept it, he has to externalize it into some great spiritual device which he calls God. — Anton Szandor LaVey

... the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe. This was one of the great inventions in this history of mankind -- not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organization, and personality. — David S. Landes

We can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. — Margaret J. Wheatley

To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents. — Galileo Galilei

In the world's history certain inventions and discoveries occurred of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveris. Of these were the art of writing and of printing, the discovery of America, and the introduction of patent laws. The date of the first ... is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second-printing-came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first. The others followed more rapidly-the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624. — Abraham Lincoln

Sometimes rules have to be broken; sometimes you have to follow your heart. Sometimes doing what you're told isn't always the right thing to do. I'm sure we wouldn't have all these great inventions and philosophies if people always just did what they were told. — Dannika Dark

It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her. — Michel De Montaigne

it says as God put his sperrit into the workman as built the tabernacle, to make him do all the carved work * and things as wanted a nice hand. And this is my way o' looking at it: there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times - weekday as well as Sunday - and i' the great works and inventions, and i' the figuring and the mechanics. And — George Eliot

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men. — Nikola Tesla

If we look at the fact, we shall find that the great inventions of the age are not, with us at least, always produced in universities. — Charles Babbage

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing. — Alva Myrdal

Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement. — Claude M. Bristol

The corporation is one of the great unheralded human inventions of destruction. It is a way to absolve from any personal liability a bunch of people. They form together in a massive ID and they do whatever they want. — Keith Olbermann

They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other. — Eugene Delacroix

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant. — Stephen Jay Gould

I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable face - which will lead to expectations of competence - I will have to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain my age, The Present, also known as "The Future" in the past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances: to be ready for questions. — Amy Leach

I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system. — Aaron Patzer

Great minds don't think alike. If they did, the Patent Office would only have about fifty inventions. — Scott Adams

That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously. — Benjamin Franklin

Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest. — Robert Henry Thurston

There are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers. — Charlie Munger

Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, india-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens's lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce's "invention" in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, "of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures," and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the "invention" is! — George Orwell

For one thing, there are many "inventions" that are not patentable. The "inventor" of the supermarket, for example, conferred great benefits on his fellowmen for which he could not charge them. Insofar as the same kind of ability is required for the one kind of invention as for the other, the existence of patents tends to divert activity to patentable inventions. — Milton Friedman

Laugh if you will ... They laughed at all great ideas and inventions. They laughed at nitrous oxide. — John Sladek

One of the great inventions of the twentieth century was the studied, methodical engineering of myth for political ends. — Caryl Rivers

I love technology. Matches, to light a fire, is really high tech. The wheel is really one of the great inventions of all time. Other than that, I am an ignoramus about technology. — William Shatner

History clearly
shows that governments that have tried to contain, regulate, or otherwise
usurp capital have failed. It is the same with brainpower; no
one has a monopoly on brainpower. Controlling brainpower is like
herding cats. Brainpower creates capital, and capital fuels brainpower.
It is a fundamental dynamic principle. Great ideas, solutions, insights,
or inventions will develop only where they are nurtured and properly
rewarded. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Want has been the great schoolmaster of the race: necessity has been the mother of all great inventions. — Orison Swett Marden

But this is so no longer, and never will be again, since man's inventions have eliminated so much distance and time; for better, for worse, we are now each of us part of the surge and swell of great economic and political movements, and whatever we do, as individuals or as nations, deeply affects everyone else. — Vera Brittain

To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace. — Chris Raschka

Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. — John Stuart Mill

Like the button, the wheelbarrow, the spoon and the umbrella, the printed book is one of the truly great inventions of mankind - beautifully efficient and enduringly ideal. The place to acquire these wonderful objects is in a bookshop, where thousands upon thousands of varieties await you. There is no substitute for the real thing. — William Boyd

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. — Christopher Hitchens

James Lovelock is one of the great thinkers of our time. His ideas and inventions have opened up new insights into our planet and the way it works, and the story behind them will appeal to a very wide audience. I am pleased to recommend this book. — Chris Rapley

The Four Great Chinese Inventions - compass, gun-powder, paper, and print - are legendary. Less talked about are meritocracy and banknotes. — Thorsten J. Pattberg

Nearly all the great improvements, discoveries, inventions, and achievements which have elevated and blessed humanity have been the triumphs of enthusiasm. — Orison Swett Marden

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great. — Edward Hopper

Thoughts and ideas are the source of all wealth, success, material gain, all great discoveries, inventions and achievements — Mark Victor Hansen

I'm onstage for an hour.I do an hour of stand-up. Actually, I do 10 minutes standing up and 50 minutes sitting in a chair. Oh, occasionally, I stand up again to do a dance or put over a song. But mostly I sit down. A great invention, sitting down. — George Burns