Edwin Land Quotes

#1. Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.

Edwin Land

#2. Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, 'Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?'

Edwin Land

#3. The world belongs to the articulate.

Edwin Land

#4. You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.

Edwin Land

#5. The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.

Edwin Land

#6. You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you're living through it.

Edwin Land

#7. As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities.

Edwin Land

#8. A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.

Edwin Land

#9. A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.

Edwin Land

#10. I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.

Edwin Land

#11. It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

Edwin Land

#12. An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Edwin Land

#13. In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.

Edwin Land

#14. The present is the past biting into the future.

Edwin Land

#15. The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.

Edwin Land

#16. Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Edwin Land

#17. If this is preparation for life, where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?

Edwin Land

#18. You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.

Edwin Land

#19. Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

Edwin Land

#20. The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.

Edwin Land

#21. We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.

Edwin Land

#22. Look, if the picture you get instantly is as beautiful as the picture you get by waiting seven days, then it is absolute madness to say that there is virtue in waiting.

Edwin Land

#23. The very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#27. 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.

Edwin Land

#28. The bottom line is in heaven!

Edwin Land

#29. Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

Edwin Land

#30. I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.

Edwin Land

#31. We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#33. Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.

Edwin Land

#34. You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.

Edwin Land

#35. A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.

Edwin Land

#36. We have to keep in practice like musicians. Besides, there are still potentialities to be realized in color film. To us, it's just like bringing up a child. You don't stop after you've had it.

Edwin Land

#37. 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.

Edwin Land

#38. Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.

Edwin Land

#39. 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.

Edwin Land

#40. A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.

Edwin Land

#41. There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!

Edwin Land

#42. Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

Edwin Land

#43. [The Polaroid camera is] a system that will be a partner in perception, enabling us to see the objects in the world around us more vividly than we can see them without it, a system to be an aid to memory and a tool for exploration.

Edwin Land

#44. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

Edwin Land

#45. Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#48. Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?

Edwin Land

#49. The second great product of industry should be the rewarding life for every person

Edwin Land

#50. 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.

Edwin Land

#51. I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.

Edwin Land

#52. 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.

Edwin Land

#53. 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.

Edwin Land

#54. 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.

Edwin Land

#55. 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.

Edwin Land

#56. There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. It is: If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.

Edwin Land

#57. Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.

Edwin Land

#58. Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#60. Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn't know they had.

Edwin Land

#61. Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#63. The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.

Edwin Land

#64. 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.

Edwin Land

#65. 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.

Edwin Land

#66. I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.

Edwin Land

#67. Don't do anything that someone else can do.

Edwin Land

#68. 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.

Edwin Land

#69. It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#72. Politeness is the poison of collaboration.

Edwin Land