Quotation Matches:
 
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Marty: This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.
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(no category)
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War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice.
-Norman Cousins
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Next came the Patent laws. These began in England in 1624; and, in this country, with the adoption of our constitution. Before then these?, any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.
-Abraham Lincoln
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Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
-Henry David Thoreau
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America
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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
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Architecture
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Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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Art
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The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.
-Hamerton
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Astronomy
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Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture.
-Jacob Bronowski
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Authors & Writing
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But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric -- and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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But words came halting forth, wanting Invention
-Sir Philip Sidney
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Beauty
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Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers. What we call art is a game.
-Octavio Paz
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Books
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In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.
-Northrop Frye
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There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
-Ernest Hemingway
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Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.
-Oscar Wilde
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Business
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The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
-Mikhail Gorbachev
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Capitalism
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What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!
-Henrik Ibsen, Pillars of Society, act 2 character Aune
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Computers
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A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
-Mitch Ratliffe
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Confusion
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The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.
-Samuel Beckett, interview, Tom F. Driver,
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Constitution
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It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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Conversation
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A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
-E. M. Cioran
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Creativity
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From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
-Ernest Hemingway
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There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
-Henry Miller
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Criticism
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There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Curiosity
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Necessity is the mother of invention is a silly proverb. Necessity is the mother of futile dodges is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Deception/Lying
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One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
-Henry Miller
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Difficulty
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The very greatest things -- great thoughts, discoveries, inventions -- have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
-Samuel Smiles
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Discontent
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If necessity is the mother of invention, discontent is the father of progress.
-David Rockefeller
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Discovery
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Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces
-Stefan Zweig, Magellan. Der Mann und seine Tat (Magellan. The Man and His Feat), p. 20, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld, S. Fischer Verlag (1983)
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Doubt
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Doubt is the father of invention.
-Galileo Galilei
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Enlightenment, The
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The arts and sciences, in general, during the three or four last centuries, have had a regular course of progressive improvement. The inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity, have occasioned changes in the condition of the world and the human character which would have astonished the most refined nations of antiquity. A continuation of similar exertions is everyday rendering Europe more and more like one community, or single family.
-John Adams
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Flight, Flying
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Of all the inventions that have helped to unify China perhaps the airplane is the most outstanding. Its ability to annihilate distance has been in direct proportion to its achievements in assisting to annihilate suspicion and misunderstanding among provincial officials far removed from one another or from the officials at the seat of government.
-Madame Chiang Kai-Shek
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Freedom
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For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.
-Joyce Cary
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Heaven
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Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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History
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Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any degree; only about as much as is used in the lowest kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and coloring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.
-Samuel Johnson
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Humanity
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As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
-Michel Foucault
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Imagination
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Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
-Joseph Conrad
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Before I put a sketch on paper, the whole idea is worked out mentally. In my mind I change the construction, make improvements, and even operate the device. Without ever having drawn a sketch I can give the measurements of all parts to workmen, and when completed all these parts will fit, just as certainly as though I had made the actual drawings. It is immaterial to me whether I run my machine in my mind or test it in my shop. The inventions I have conceived in this way have always worked. In thirty years there has not been a single exception. My first electric motor, the vacuum wireless light, my turbine engine and many other devices have all been developed in exactly this way.
-Nikola Tesla
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Industry
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Industry has operated against the artisan in favor of the idler, and also in favor of capital and against labor. Any mechanical invention whatsoever has been more harmful to humanity than a century of war.
-Remy De Gourmont
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Inspirational
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Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, and black despair succeeds brown study.
-William Congreve
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Inventing, Inventions
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Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
-Bertolt Brecht
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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
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The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
-Henry George
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Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
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We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- gunpowder and romantic love.
-Andr
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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
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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)
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Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
-Jonathan Swift
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Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
-Jonathan Swift
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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
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Language
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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
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Laziness
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I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
-Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977
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Learning
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Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them.
-Plato
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Letters (writing)
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Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
-Sydney Smith
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Life
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The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.
-J. Z. Young
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Music
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I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.
-Martin Luther
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Rock 'n Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.
-Greil Marcus
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity -- their links with their dead and the unborn.
-John Berger
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Nature
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Although human subtlety makes a variety of inventions by different means to the same end, it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.
-Leonardo DaVinci
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I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am over instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Nature, 1850
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Necessity
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Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true -- but it's father is creativity, and knowledge is the midwife.
-Jonathan Schattke
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Opera
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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
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Play/Games
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If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.
-Jean Piaget
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Poetry
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All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
-Gustave Flaubert
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Poverty
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As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance - who could not get work, and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread - they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left. It would not do to stop the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements; the war could not be terminated; efficient relief could not be raised. There was no help then; so the unemployed underwent their destiny - ate the bread and drank the waters of affliction.
Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings.
-Charlotte Bronte, Shirley Part One, Chapter II. The Wagons
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Progress
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Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
-Susan B. Anthony
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Reading
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Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Religion
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I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/reason1.htm
-Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part First, Section 1
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Science
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Faith is a fine invention when Gentleman can see -- but microscopes are prudent in an emergency
-Emily Dickinson
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Sound, Noise
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In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.
-Luigi Russolo
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Success & Failure
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One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But speaking for myself, I can honestly say this is not so... I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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Technology
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The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
-Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, Harper and Row, New York, 1988, p 135
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Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Television
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Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your Living room by people you wouldn't have in your house.
-David Frost
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Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
-Sir David Paradine Frost
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We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
-Robert Maynard Hutchins
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Theater
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By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.
-Arthur Miller
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O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
-William Shakespeare, Henry V (prologue)
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Thought
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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
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Visualization
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My method is different. I do not rush into actual work. When I get a new idea, I start at once building it up in my imagination, and make improvements and operate the device in my mind. When I have gone so far as to embody everything in my invention, every possible improvement I can think of, and when I see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form the final product of my brain.
-Nikola Tesla
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Words
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But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.
-Galileo Galilei
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Work
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I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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