Edwin Land Quotes
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In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance.
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Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.
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Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.
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A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.
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The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.
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Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.
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We have to keep in practice like musicians. Besides, there are still potentialities to be realized in color film. To us, it's just like bringing up a child. You don't stop after you've had it.
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In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.
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An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.
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If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved.
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I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.
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If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it.
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Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?
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Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
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An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off.
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I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great.
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The world belongs to the articulate.
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I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.
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Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.
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Don't do anything that someone else can do.
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There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.
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Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.
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There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!
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You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.
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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.
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It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious. This is true not only for those who have not previously been acquainted with the problem, but also for those who have worked over it for years.
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I say that our system of tests and grades, as it now exists, is one source of the low yield of great men from our universities. The marking system is a traumatic experience from which most students emerge with a deep determination never to get into a situation where they can be marked again. They just won't ever again take a chance.
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When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.
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The present is the past biting into the future.
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A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.
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