Innovation Quotes (15)
'...no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth … and to see the errors … in the vale below:' so always that this prospect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride.
Quoting an unnamed poet and adding a comment.
Quoting an unnamed poet and adding a comment.
I. Of Truth,' Essays (1597). In Francis Bacon and Basil Montagu, The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England (1852), 11
... an opportunity to allow the bees in one's bonnet to buzz even more noisily than usual.
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, trans. F. Gaynor (1950), 97. Quoted in David L. Hull, Science as a Process (1990), 379.
See also: | Opposition (7)
As the births of living creatures are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
XXIV. On Innovation,' Essays (1597). In Francis Bacon and Basil Montagu, The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England (1852), 32
I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.
See also: | Invention (84)
I'm convinced that the best solutions are often the ones that are counterintuitive - that challenge conventional thinking - and end in breakthroughs. It is always easier to do things the same old way...why change? To fight this, keep your dissatisfaction index high and break with tradition. Don't be too quick to accept the way things are being done. Question whether there's a better way. Very often you will find that once you make this break from the usual way - and incidentally, this is probably the hardest thing to do—and start on a new track your horizon of new thoughts immediately broadens. New ideas flow in like water. Always keep your interests broad - don't let your mind be stunted by a limited view.
1988
If there is a regulation that says you have to do something—whether it be putting in seat belts, catalytic converters, clean air for coal plants, clean water—the first tack that the lawyers use, among others things, and that companies use, is that it's going to drive the electricity bill up, drive the cost of cars up, drive everything up. It repeatedly has been demonstrated that once the engineers start thinking about it, it's actually far less than the original estimates. We should remember that when we hear this again, because you will hear it again.
Talk (Apr 2007) quoted in 'Obama's Energy and Environment Team Includes a Nobel Laureate', Kent Garber, USNews website (posted 11 Dec 2008).
Innovations, free thinking is blowing like a storm; those that stand in front of it, ignorant scholars like you, false scientists, perverse conservatives, obstinate goats, resisting mules are being crushed under the weight of these innovations. You are nothing but ants standing in front of the giants; nothing but chicks trying to challenge roaring volcanoes!
From the play Galileo Galilei (2001) .
See also: | Ant (3) | Conservative (2) | False (13) | Giant (3) | Ignorance (62) | Scholar (8) | Scientist (71) | Storm (4) | Thinking (56) | Volcano (14)
It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
The Haunted Bookshop (1919), 13.
See also: | Thought (65)
It’s very dangerous to invent something in our times; ostentatious men of the other world, who are hostile to innovations, roam about angrily. To live in peace, one has to stay away from innovations and new ideas. Innovations, like trees, attract the most destructive lightnings to themselves.
From the play Galileo Galilei (2001) .
See also: | Attract (4) | Dangerous (8) | Hostility (2) | Idea (83) | Invention (84) | Lightning (8) | Peace (5) | Tree (18)
New ideas seem like frightening ghosts to people at the beginning; they run away from them for a long time, but they get tired of it in the end!
From the play Galileo Galilei (2001) .
Surely every medicine is an innovation, and he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils for time is the greatest innovator.
XXIV. On Innovation,' Essays (1597). In Francis Bacon and Basil Montagu, The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England (1852), 32
See also: | Medicine (127)
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
The Art of the Soluble (1967). Quoted in Colin J. Sanderson, Understanding Genes and GMOs (2007), 1.
See also: | Idea (83)
The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done—men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered.
From remarks at a conference on cognitive development, Cornell University (1964). In Philip Hampson Taylor, New Directions in Curriculum Studies (1979), 90.
See also: | Creativity (14) | Discovery (166) | Education (118) | Invention (84) | Mind (116) | Verify (2)
The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.
'Innovation in Physics', Scientific American, 1958, 199, 76.