Inventions Quotes

When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?

Enrico Bombieri

A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.

Francis Picabia

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

Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried

Thomas Jefferson

In my own time there have been inventions of this sort, transparent windows tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building short-hand, which has been carried to such a perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.

Bertolt Brecht

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

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

Fear is a great inventor.

Proverb

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

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- gunpowder and romantic love.

Andre Maurois

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.

Thomas Alva Edison

The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Gyorgyi

Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.

Mark Twain

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.

Thomas Carlyle

We can invent only with memory.

Alphonse Karr

If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.

George Gobel

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

Lord (George Gordon) Byron