Top 100 Quotes About Inventions
#1. Footnoting references, signalling quotations, and so on were no part of a 13th-century scholar's duty. He could recycle his own and his predecessor's work without a qualm. He knew nothing of copyright and plagiarism, which are 17th-century inventions.
Fergus Kerr
#2. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
Carl Sagan
#3. For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
James Russell Lowell
#4. I wonder," said Miss Oliver, "if humanity will be any happier because of aeroplanes. It seems to me that the sum of human happiness remains much the same from age to age, no matter how it may vary in distribution, and that all the 'many inventions' neither lessen nor increase it." "After
L.M. Montgomery
#5. 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
#6. The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.
Adolf Hitler
#7. The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.
John Moody
#10. On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#11. It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
John Stuart Mill
#12. I tried to think about other things. I tried to invent optimistic inventions. But the pessimistic ones were extremely loud.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#13. 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
#14. To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.
Dean Kamen
#15. Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic.
Vivianne Crowley
#16. To me, the smell of fresh-made coffee is one of the greatest inventions.
Hugh Jackman
#17. 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
#18. I hate it. I just do. That [artificial turf], local news, the IRS, and hair dryers are the four worst inventions of the century.
Beano Cook
#19. The fictioneer labors under the constraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no limitation.
Donald E. Westlake
#20. If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you.
Jimi Hendrix
#21. Andrade [who was looking after wartime inventions] is like an inverted Micawber, waiting for something to turn down.
Henry Tizard
#22. In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.
John Muir
#24. Excel spreadsheets might as well be one of the most dangerous recent inventions.
Rolf Dobelli
#25. 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
#26. I don't usually direct actors in the classic sense of that word. Instead, I try to remind the characters before the shoot what's going on in a very simple way. I then watch them, their inventions as actors, approving or not approving what they're doing.
Gus Van Sant
#27. Truly novel inventions emerge only in one's youth. Later one becomes ever more experienced, famous-and foolish.
Albert Einstein
#28. The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man's ability to invent which has made human society what it is. The mental processes of inventions are still mysterious. They are rational but not logical, that is to say, not deductive.
Dennis Gabor
#29. I always find myself stopping to write down ideas of things I'd like to make from computer hardware items to things new moms need - inventions to share with others to make their lives more fun or interesting or easy.
Lisa Loeb
#30. Ordinary-size people, they don't know: their lives have been rehearsed and rehearsed by every single person who ever lived before them, inventions and improvements and unimportant notions each generation, each year. In 600BC somebody did something that makes your life easier today; in 1217, 1892.
Elizabeth McCracken
#31. Thoughts and ideas are the source of all wealth, success, material gain, all great discoveries, inventions and achievements
Mark Victor Hansen
#32. Is it possible that despite our inventions and progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#33. 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
#34. Those palates who, not yet two summers younger, must have inventions to delight the taste, would now be glad of bread, and beg for it.
William Shakespeare
#35. Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
Vernor Vinge
#36. I enjoy reading and I'm a huge kindle fan, the device you can read eBooks with. One of the best inventions of all times. I just recently purchased a Dostojewski collection, for just $1. At that rate I will probably own 3 million books soon.
Robert Pattinson
#37. The wealthiest place on the planet is the graveyard, because in the graveyard we will find inventions that we were never ever exposed to, ideas, dreams that never became a reality, hopes and aspirations that were never acted upon.
Les Brown
#38. As we distance ourselves further from the natural world, we are increasingly surrounded by and dependent on our own inventions. We become enslaved by the constant demands of technology created to serve us.
David Suzuki
#39. It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything--artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.
Victor Hugo
#40. It is with epigrams as with other inventions; the best ones annoy us because we didn't think of them ourselves.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#41. Some of my inventions didn't take off. I invented a url lengthener.
Andy Kindler
#42. I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion.
Costa-Gavras
#43. As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends.
Arthur Kornberg
#44. We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from the earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. Man loves the marvelous. It has an irresistible charm for him. He is always ready to leave that with which he is familiar to pursue vain inventions. He lends himself to his own deception.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#46. The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#47. Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#48. But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.
Stefan Zweig
#49. After all, the whole of humanity was anchored by inventions, contrivances, unrealities. Xiao Li lived on dreams, as most people do.
Victor Robert Lee
#51. Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
Kenneth Clark
#52. What if most of the technologies readers and cinemagoers are presented with in bestselling books and blockbuster movies are not science fiction, but science fact? What if they currently exist on the planet, but are suppressed from the masses?
James Morcan
#53. My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions ... . The dove is my emblem ... . I want to save and advance human life, not destroy it ... . I am proud of the fact that I have never invented weapons to kill ... .
Thomas A. Edison
#54. Remember, there are more people in the world than yourself. Be modest! You have not yet invented nor thought anything which others have not thought or invented before. And should you really have done so, consider it a gift of heaven which you are to share with others.
Robert Schumann
#55. 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
#56. Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions
Thomas S. Kuhn
#57. People are inherently wary and fearful. What is a person more afraid of, the paucity of their dreams or the satanic magnitude of their nightmares? Poetic inventions containing elements of truth comprise all of our nighttime dreams and ephemeral daydreams.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#58. All inventions are not patentable, and all patented subjects are not inventions.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#59. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one's insight, to avoid questions like "Where do your ideas come from?" Or to escape inquiry into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction.
Toni Morrison
#60. Inventions are rarely just a sudden bright idea. Even if they are, they usually have antecedents in the form of pieces of the idea ... Piecing these things together gives one a sense of where inventions come from, and that's interesting.
Richard Rhodes
#61. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge.
Jules Verne
#62. I have no private interest in the reception of my inventions by the world, having never made, nor proposed to make, the least profit by any of them.
Benjamin Franklin
#63. The greatest inventions are those inquiries which tend to increase the power of man over matter.
Benjamin Franklin
#64. For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.
Jon Bon Jovi
#65. Neighbor is no longer confined to the vocabulary of the individual. It is a national word. Modern inventions have annihilated distance. Commercial relations have broken down barriers of race and religion, and the family of nations is a recognized fact.
David Josiah Brewer
#66. Up to 90% of all inventions of the world comes from the Protestant world
Sunday Adelaja
#67. If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.
Nathan Myhrvold
#68. The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality.
Reggie White
#70. Olive Wellwood had the feeling writers often have when told perfect tales for fictions, that there was too much fact, too little space for the necessary insertion of inventions, which would here appear to be lies.
A.S. Byatt
#71. I am all for the inclusion of foreign cultures, not their omission in our media. Foreign names, brands, and inventions must be allowed to show and to compete in US publications. Today, most foreign words are still banned. And almost 7 billion people whose first language is not English are silenced.
Thorsten J. Pattberg
#72. 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
#73. Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is.
Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012)
Nigel Hey
#74. Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.
Bertrand Russell
#75. It's very important, no matter what you may do professionally, to keep alive some of the healthy interests of your youth. Children's play is not just kids' stuff. Children's play is rather the stuff of most future inventions.
Fred Rogers
#76. All our inventions have endowed material forces with intellectual life, and degraded human life into a material force.
Karl Marx
#77. We daily witness the beneficial effect produced to the community by the institution of premiums, held out to encourage the inventions of ingenious mechanics.
Joseph Lancaster
#78. Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.
Thomas Jefferson
#79. We had a rule in Tibet that anyone proposing a new invention had to guarentee that it was beneficial, or at least harmless, for seven generations of humans before it could be adopted.
Dalai Lama
#80. I think I'd be quite good at Builder, like designer, construction ... I've always liked making things. I'm quite good with my hands. So I think I'd be quite good at designing new inventions.
Thomas Brodie-Sangster
#81. Inventions have long-since reached their limit
and I see no hope for further developments.
Julius Frontinus, world-famous engineer (Rome, 10 AD)
Julius Frontinus
#82. 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
#83. He had realized that the labels he had been taking so seriously are human inventions
it's all a game. The Number 68 is invented and the A is invented, so we might as well choose to invent something that brightens our life and the lives of the people around us.
Benjamin Zander
#84. It is obvious that anything a scientist discovers or invents is based on previous discoveries and inventions. The same applies to the arts.
Lukas Foss
#85. Let's turn British inventions into British industries, British factories and British jobs. Let them make pounds for us, not dollars marks or yen for others.
John Major
#86. I loathe all political parties, which I regard as inventions of the devil. My favourite prime minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not because he was on the Right, but because he spent a year in office without, on his own admission, doing a damned thing.
George MacDonald Fraser
#87. Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Walt Disney Company
#88. Technology is not simply additive; it is more often exponential. An invention usually triggers other inventions.
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh
#89. 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
#90. Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.
Virginia Postrel
#91. I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.
Lionel Blue
#92. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own.
Hugo Ball
#93. The history of technology tells us that inventions are two a penny. There are many, many people who invent new things: machines, processes, tools, gizmos, gadgets, widgets, and the like. Such people are often portrayed as unsung heroes, ahead of their field, unrecognized in their own time
Anonymous
#94. As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far - much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet.
H.L. Mencken
#95. 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
#96. In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.
Dean Kamen
#97. Of all human inventions the organization, a machine constructed of people performing interdependent functions, is the most powerful.
Robert Shea
#99. We owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness either enforced or voluntary.
Agatha Christie
#100. Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me the choice is easy.
Michael Scott
