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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"But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay; Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows... Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me; ‘look in thy heart and write.’"
-Sir Philip Sidney
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]
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
-Mitch Ratliffe
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, “Beckett by the Medeleine” p. 22, Columbia University Forum IV (Summer, 1961)
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
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—in the beginning, there was spice.
-Stefan Zweig, Magellan. Der Mann und seine Tat (Magellan. The Man and His Feat), p. 20, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld, S. Fischer Verlag (1983)
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
“…truth again is beginning to shine, and they who are honest in heart will behold its heavenly light and rejoice; yea, many have beheld it, and not only beheld, but embraced, and are greatly rejoicing that God is unchangeable, that his Spirit is the same today as yesterday and forever, and that the voice of inspiration is again heard in the land as in olden times. Who could have supposed five years ago that truth would have spread so rapid for whether we look to the east, or to the west, to the north or to the south, we perceive its mighty progress, upheld by the hand of Omnipotence--it moves in majesty and power, and continues its steady course, pulling down the strong holds of Babylon, and leaving her mighty towers, exposing the creeds, systems and inventions of men, exhibiting the extreme ignorance, follies and errors of all sects, which causes their priests to rage and their mighty ones to tremble.”
http://www.boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/OPratt.html
-Orson Pratt, Writings (1811-1838)
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
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
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
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
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
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]
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
A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person – perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
-Carl Sagan
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
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
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)
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
