Edwin Land
If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.Collection: Money
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.Collection: Power
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.Collection: Failure
Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
Politeness is the poison of collaboration.
Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.
Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.Collection: Obsolete
My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is: Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.Collection: Important
Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.Collection: Long
A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.Collection: Mistake
Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.Collection: Art
You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.Collection: Failure
[The Polaroid camera is] a system that will be a partner in perception, enabling us to see the objects in the world around us more vividly than we can see them without it, a system to be an aid to memory and a tool for exploration.Collection: Memories
Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn't know they had.Collection: People
A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.Collection: Acceptance
A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.Collection: Mistake
The present is the past biting into the future.Collection: Past
Don't do anything that someone else can do.Collection: Can Do
The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.Collection: Art
We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.Collection: Mean
If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved.Collection: Important
We took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren't particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren't hard.Collection: Believe
Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.Collection: Years
Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Small Changes
I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.Collection: Believe
Aladdin in his most intoxicated moments would never have dreamed of asking his [djinn] for [a polaroid] ... It's utterly new in concept and appearance, utilizing an utterly revolutionary flash system, an utterly revolutionary viewing system, utterly revolutionary electronics, and utterly revolutionary film structure.Collection: Asking
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Creativity
As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities...Collection: Creative
The bottom line is in heaven!Collection: Business
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.Collection: Successful
If this is preparation for life, where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?Collection: Thinking
...from this day forward until the day you are buried, do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight, and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day.Collection: Thinking
An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.Collection: Business
The world belongs to the articulate.Collection: World
The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.Collection: Ideas
There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.Collection: School
Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.Collection: Competition
There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.Collection: Creativity
[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.Collection: Cameras
This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animalsCollection: Health
It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.Collection: Research
As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.Collection: Creativity
All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.Collection: Mistake