Edwin H Land Quotes

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

Edwin Land

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. The bottom line is in heaven!

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#14. 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

#15. Every significant invention 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.

Edwin H. Land

#16. Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.

Edwin H. Land

#17. Politeness is the poison of collaboration.

Edwin Land

#18. 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

#19. The world belongs to the articulate.

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.

Edwin Morgan

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#28. 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

#29. Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

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

Edwin Land

#34. Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Edwin Land