Human Invention Quotes

#1. With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

James Gleick

#2. Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes.

Oliver Sacks

#3. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.

Victor Hugo

#4. Our modern conception of the average person is not a mathematical truth but a human invention, created a century and a half ago by two European scientists to solve the social problems of their era.

Todd Rose

#5. No bra," he said against her mouth. "Thank you. I hate those things. Dumbest human invention. Ever.

Larissa Ione

#6. Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

Barry Lopez

#7. So you truly do not believe in God?"
"I find no reason to, in nature ... If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention.

Umberto Eco

#8. The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

John Banville

#9. All these words, words like 'evil' and 'vicious', they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.

John Marsden

#10. Beauty is not a human invention.

Saul Bellow

#11. You think civilization is some horrible, polluting human invention that separates us from the state of nature. But civilization doesn't separate us from nature. Civilization protects us from nature.

CRICHTON Michael

#12. I'm a raging leftist political activist. I've never had a spiritual thought in my life related to God. I'm clear that that's a human invention.

Patch Adams

#13. Envy, it was often said among shicts, was the mother of human invention,

Sam Sykes

#14. Revenge,' he said, 'is a human invention. It serves no purpose.

John Ajvide Lindqvist

#15. It is a fraud of the Christian system to call the sciences human invention; it is only the application of them that is human.

Thomas Paine

#16. The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

Jared Diamond

#17. The modernists started with the assumption that science is the only source of sure knowledge, that nature is all there is, and thus that morality is merely a human invention that can be changed to meet changing circumstances in an evolving world.

Charles Colson

#18. Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.

Thomas Paine

#19. It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#20. Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention.

Robert M. Pirsig

#21. 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

#22. The calendar is a human invention; time does not exist on the spiritual level.

Isabel Allende

#23. Money is only a human invention.

Vanna Bonta

#24. Money is only a human invention. I get paid for my work, it's a system of trade, but it's not my purpose and reason for living.

Vanna Bonta

#25. Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive.

Frans De Waal

#26. We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

Andrew O'Hagan

#27. Horses are not for riding! They do not exist for riding! Horse riding is man's invention! It is the making up of human benefit!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#28. With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

Neil Postman

#29. The most amazing and effective inventions are not those which do most honour to the human genius.

Voltaire

#30. It is clear to me that "religions" are the invention of man, and therefore exhibit all the strengths and weaknesses of human nature.

Ronald R. Cooke

#31. We know the Arts are the archives of our human history, the wind of invention and the heartbeat of humanity

Natasha Tsakos

#32. It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

Carl Sagan

#33. ... to his efforts to perpetuate man: but he has preserved nothing but sensations; and, although his invention was incomplete, he at least foreshadowed the truth: man will one day create human life.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

#34. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.

Walter J. Ong

#35. But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature.
Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself.

Gaston Bachelard

#36. Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.

Carl Sagan

#37. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

Paulo Freire

#38. I hate the idea of natural. For example, I prefer gardens to wild nature. I like to see the human touch. High heels are a complete invention - an extravagance. They're far from natural, but it's the impracticality that I adore. I prefer the useless to the useful, the sophisticated to the natural.

Christian Louboutin

#39. The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

Dave Barry

#40. Human inventions march from the
complex to the simple, and simplicity is always perfection.

Alexandre Dumas

#41. Dogbert to Dilbert
"My invention can detect human stupidity. It has a very simple interface. All I do is point it at people."
"Then what does it do?"
"Why would it need to do anything else?

Scott Adams

#42. The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change.

Thomas A. Edison

#43. Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Virginia Woolf

#44. I thought the invention of mobile phone was to save our time & money, be we are doing exactly the opposite.

Srinivas Shenoy

#45. Presley brought an excitement to singing, in part because rock and roll was greeted as his invention, but for other reasons not so widely reflected on: Elvis Presley had the most beautiful singing voice of any human being on earth.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#46. One of the ways that your project, your personal healing, or your social invention can change the world is through story. But even if no one ever learns of it, even if it is invisible to every human on Earth, it will have no less of an effect.

Charles Eisenstein

#47. If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

John Banville

#48. Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?

Mark Twain

#49. Whether humanity is to comprehensively prosper ... depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. The cosmic question has been asked: are humans worthwhile to universe invention?

R. Buckminster Fuller

#50. Change is no modern invention. It is as old as time and as unlikely to disappear. It has always to be counted on as of the essence of human experience.

James Rowland Angell

#51. Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#52. I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas

John F. Kennedy

#53. Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

William James

#54. War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.

Norman Cousins

#55. The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences.

Albert Einstein

#56. Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

Russell Baker

#57. All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.

Karl Marx

#58. I am an entrepreneur and my goal is to create invention to the solution of human trafficking and extreme poverty.

David Batstone

#59. There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.

Joshua Foer

#60. It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind

Isaac Asimov

#61. Money is human kind's greatest invention. Money doesn't discriminate. Money doesn't care whether a person is poor, whether a person comes from a good family, or what his skin color is. Anybody can make money.

Takafumi Horie

#62. That's human nature - we want to completely rewrite history so it can be comfortable. Without getting too profound, I'm pretty sure that's where the invention of the afterlife comes from. "We don't really become worm food. We go to a magical place with bunnies and rainbows."

Bobcat Goldthwait

#63. Hell was never God's intention. It is man's invention. It is a human-manufactured religious icon, no less idolatrous than deifying a statue.

Carlton D. Pearson

#64. Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.

Nikola Tesla

#65. Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

Philippa Perry

#66. In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#67. Inventions and purely human institutions.

Jean Meslier

#68. Evidently, I'd suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

Tom Robbins

#69. The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.

Ha-Joon Chang

#70. This was the invention of modern American philanthropy as we know it. The idea of systematizing giving to achieve human progress was the true innovation of John D. Rockefeller, and ultimately the Rockefeller Foundation's legacy.

Judith Rodin