Quotations and Poems

» “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.”
– Alexander Graham Bell

»  ”Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.”
– Bertolt Brecht

»  ”The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.”
– James E. Burke

»  ”This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.”
– Thomas Carlyle

»  ”I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.”
– Thomas A. Edison

»  ”Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.”
– Thomas A. Edison

»  ”Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.”
– Henry George

»  ”If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.”
– George Gobel

»  ”Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin

»  ”Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
– Albert Gyorgyi

»  ”That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best –make it all up –but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.”
– Ernest Hemingway

»  ”The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure.”
– Lyndon B. Johnson

»  ”We can invent only with memory.”
– Alphonse Karr

»  ”We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity — gunpowder and romantic love.”
– Andre Maurois

»  ”I don’t mind occasionally having to reinvent a wheel; I don’t even mind using someone’s reinvented wheel occasionally. But it helps a lot if it is symmetric, contains no fewer than ten sides, and has the axle centered. I do tire of trapezoidal wheels with offset axles.”
– Joseph Newcomer

»  ”A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.”
– Francis Picabia

»  ”Fear is a great inventor.”
– French Proverb

»  ”Invention strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come from nothing.”
– Sir Joshua Reynolds

»  ”Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.”
– Jonathan Swift

»  ”Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.”
– Jonathan Swift

»  ”Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.”
– Mark Twain

»  ”The right of an inventor to his invention is no monopoly; in any other sense than a man’s house is a monopoly.”
– Daniel Webster

»  ”It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.”
– Oscar Wilde