Selected innovation quotes

1. The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

2. 'Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.'

3. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

4. Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.

5. The computing field is always in need of new cliches.

6. You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

7. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

8. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

9. I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

10. Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

11. I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.

12. To be sure of winning, invent your own game, and never tell any other player the rules.

13. It is pleasant to be admitted into the birth-chamber of a great idea destined to be translated into action.

14. Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

15. Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.

16. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

17. When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.

18. You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.

19. Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

20. That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to... grapple with the unfamiliar.

21. David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.

22. I love strange choices. I'm always interested in people who depart from what is expected of them and go into new territory.

23. A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day without repeating himself.

24. We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

25. The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

26. When the established members of academia start becoming vocal as to how poor your art is, then you know you're on to something.

27. Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

28. In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

29. The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.

30. The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

31. Progress comes from finding better ways to do things. Don't be afraid of innovation. Don't be afraid of ideas that are not your own.

32. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

33. The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.

34. Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

35. There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.

36. We are to a large extent an imitative society.

37. Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

38. What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now.

39. Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam! afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the field of air.

40. Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

41. Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!

42. No wonder that all who have had something new to offer humanity have had nothing good to say of the state or its laws.

43. We tend to think of Freud as a great innovator, but the truth is that he himself rested, like a ship on an iceberg, on a huge body of theory and knowledge which had accumulated before his time. Even the famous Unconscious had made its appearance at least seven decades earlier. As for such supposedly modern phenomena as multiple personalities, the vogue for them began in the first half of the nineteenth century; and the first case in which the perpetrator of a murder pleaded amnesia, and got off, was in the eighteen eighties.

44. In the early days of the DCC I preferred to let the proponents do their thing and then see how it all worked out in the end. Now we are pretty close to the end.

45. New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers. (p.47)

46. The Leonardo da Vinci of our time.

47. Townspeople: A black sheriff? Blinkin: He's Black?! Ahchoo: Why not? It worked in Blazing Saddles.

48. He would wake up with a hundred ideas. Of them ninety-five were dangerous; three more were bad; the remaining two, however, were brilliant.

49. In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.

50. Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the stakes have gotten smaller, the process more bureaucratized, and the personalities less interesting.

51. The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

52. 'Borlaug's work saved the Indian sub-continent from mass starvation. In his 90 years on this planet its human population has grown from about one billion to more than six billion. Without the hybrid wheats it was Borlaug's life's mission to develop and promote among the world's poorest farmers, few believe that this population could have been sustained.'

53. 'Dr. Norman Borlaug holds the record for longevity as a 'persistent pioneer' in the development of a new cooperative approach among the countries of the world in the alleviation of hunger.'

54. ''The battle to feed all of humanity is over,' biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb ... But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties ... Borlaug, who unfortunately is far less well-known than doomsayer Ehrlich, is responsible for much of the progress humanity has made against hunger.'

55. 'Borlaug is one of the great humanitarians of the 20th Century - and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for a lifetime of work feeding a hungry world. The breeds of wheat he developed - with strong disease resistance, high yield potential and the ability to withstand poor growing conditions - led the 'Green Revolution' that saved literally hundreds of millions of lives in developing nations that were prone to terrible famines.'

56. How can I figure out something that isn't just the logical conclusion of things that human beings have already figured out and written somewhere? You think of things all the time I'm trying to conceive of something inconceivable. I'm trying to find answers to questions that humans beings have never even tried to ask.

57. First were the thick stone walls, the arches, then the domes and vaults - of the architect, searching out for wider spaces. Now it is concrete-reinforced that gives our imagination flight with its soaring spans and uncommon cantilevers. Concrete, to which architecture is integrated, through which it is able to discard the foregone conclusions of rationalism, with its monotony and repetitious solutions. A concern for beauty, a zest for fantasy, and an ever-present element of surprise bear witness that today's architecture is not a minor craft bound to straight-edge rules, but an architecture imbued with technology: light, creative and unfettered, seeking out its architectural scene.

58. I didn't want to repeat the same notes in the second verse that I used in the first, so I wrote out all the notes of the song and all the notes that were missing in the scale, given that there are twelve notes from octave to octave. All those notes that weren't in the scale were the ones I wanted in for the next verse. The listener isn't aware that they are new notes, but the sound is pleasing to the ear. I change the key, and somehow it's fresh because you haven't heard those notes before.

59. Ideas are somewhat like babies--they are born small, immature, and shapeless. They are promise rather than fulfillment. In the innovative company executives do not say, 'This is a damn-fool idea.' Instead they ask, 'What would be needed to make this embryonic, half-baked, foolish idea into something that makes sense, that is an opportunity for us?' -- The Frontiers of Management (1986)

60. All economic activity is by definition 'high risk.' And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow. -- Innovations and Entrepreneurship (1985)

61. The better a man is, the more mistakes will he make--for the more new things he will try. I would never promote a man into a top level job who had not made mistakes, and big ones at that. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre. -- The Practice of Management (1954)

62. I like Houston. It's the last great 19th-century city. Houston has a spirit about it that is truly American, an optimism. People there aren't afraid to try something new.

63. I believe in juxtaposition of the arts.

64. The duty of the artist is to strain against the bonds of the existing style.

65. Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

66. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: 'Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.'

67. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

68. Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.

69. You know, whenever you do something new and original, people run to see it because it's different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it's been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other's throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It's like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called 'creative notes' and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren't.

70. In the pretext of the academic being detestable, the worst in the class was made a hero! He opens the door to the ethics of shit! Newness at whatever cost and art becomes just a latrine!

71. Racing improves the breed.

72. We will not be content with this victory alone [first win in F1]. We will study why we won and aggressively apply those winning technologies to new cars.

73. Since I was a small child, one of my dreams has been to compete in motor vehicle races all over the world with a vehicle of my own making, and to win.

74. Orthodoxy can be as stubborn in science as in religion. I do not know how to shake it except by vigorous imagination that inspires unconventional work and contains within itself an elevated potential for inspired error. As the great Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto wrote: 'Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.' Not to mention a man named Thomas Henry Huxley who, when not in the throes of grief or the wars of parson hunting, argued that 'irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.'

75. The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.

76. 'At some point, we're going to see a quarterback who can run and throw, something truly special. Steve McNair is on the cusp of becoming that kind of quarterback.'

77. The transition to a GUI, and eventually to one close to a Macintosh, was a far greater step than refinements since. Some of these are just simple alternatives, which can't be over-valued due to increasing the complexity of having less consistency in how things are done. Others of these are more akin to rearranging the furniture. The great change was in becoming a modern GUI machine. In that sense, virtually every machine is a 'Macintosh' now.

78. I have a box of powdered water. I never know what to add.

79. Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. ... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.

80. 'Old' and 'new' are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget - the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.

81. 'The mediaeval university looked backwards: it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge... The modern university looks forward: it is a factory of new knowledge'

82. A lot of progress was being made there at MIT. Those guys had molecules jumping through hoops like poodles in a circus.

83. The pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. The rewards of such exploration both for the Nation and the individual are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress.

84. Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

85. Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.

86. Vannevar Bush is a great name for playing six degrees of separation. Turn back the clock on any aspect of information technology - from the birth of Silicon Valley and the marriage of science and the military to the advent of the World Wide Web - and you find his footprints. As historian Michael Sherry says, 'To understand the world of Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, start with understanding Vannevar Bush.'

87. I don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin - how do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we're convinced we must start answering the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community that will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can't find anywhere else in the world.

88. Fantasia, to me is a whole new opportunity. For my medium it opens up unlimited possibilities. Music has always played a very important part since sound came into the cartoon. Now, the full expression that comes from the new Fantasound opens up a whole new world for us.

89. I've never believed in doing sequels. I didn't want to waste the time I have doing a sequel; I'd rather be using that time doing something new and different.

90. It would be certainly a very foolish thing: try paint the Internet, start making oil-on-canvas paintings out of the computer world.

91. General procedure: Read and learn all you can about problem. Look at problem from a point of zero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at . . . To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure.

92. He who is not smart enough to create, must be brave enough to copy.

93. The redistribution of wealth through taxes is not the solution. It has ignored and punished the constructive effort, making the talent used for developing new businesses (which create more jobs and new wealth) dull.

94. ...the main achievement of Einstein was precisely in the fact that he refused to divide verbally time and space, which experimentally cannot be so divided.

95. ... I had some suggestions [about fencing]. I thought that you could encourage surprise attacks. I thought that would be very good. I kind of liked the idea of arming one guy with a conventional sword but giving the other a pikestaff. My favourite was the idea of blindfolding one of the competitors or blindfolding them both and spinning them around a bit so they were a little bit unstable and then just pushing them towards each other. It would make each match go on a bit longer.

96. 'The headline news of 'Platinum', which can be appreciated by fans, scholars, critics and religious fanatics alike, is the inclusion of a newly discovered 1954 demo of the unsigned Elvis singing a lilting wisp of a pop song called 'I'll Never Stand in Your Way'. His unsophisticated performance is mesmerizing; clearly indebted to the style of the 'Ink Spots', Elvis' airy tenor floats delicately above his own guitar accompaniment, aching and somewhat pinched in its feeling; you sense the singer itching to cut loose, to really swing the lyric, open it up; it is in those moments, when the pentimento of the blues vocalist reveals itself, that the melding of styles that soon would change the course of popular music is on fleeting display; it's rare when a single song can be said to make a pricey box-set worthwhile, but this particular 'Rosetta stone' of a rare cut, does precisely that. Big time.

97. Les avions sont des jouets interessants mais n'ont aucune utilite militaire

98. We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances...

99. I think I can pinpoint the one moment when the American style of dressing first appeared. It was in an appalling 1933 movie called Dancing Lady during an otherwise forgettable dance number. It also just happened to be Fred Astaire's first on-camera dance. But don't look at the steps. Look at the outfit: Astaire is wearing a single-breasted, soft flannel suit with two-tone spectator shoes and a turtleneck. You wish you could look that stylish! Later that year, in Flying Down to Rio, we get the full Astaire impact. The muted plaid suit is not all that striking, but Fred is wearing it with a soft button-down shirt, a pale woven tie, silk pocket square, bright horizontally striped hose and white bucks. Whoa! Now that's different. This melange of the classic and the sporty was an American innovation. As we approach the impeccable Astaire's 100th birthday on May 10, it's worth remembering that he remains the greatest exemplar of that style.

100. Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty. I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. 'Could' is not the same as 'will'. To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job.