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Fear is a great inventor.
-Proverb
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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 real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
-Thomas Carlyle
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I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
-Thomas Alva Edison
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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
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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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If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.
-George Gobel
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Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
-Albert Gyorgyi
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That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best --make it all up --but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
-Ernest Hemingway
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The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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We can invent only with memory.
-Alphonse Karr
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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.
-Andre Maurois
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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
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A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.
-Francis Picabia
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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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Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.
-Mark Twain
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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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Books about Inventing, Inventions
