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I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating systems of electric lighting...not only on account of danger, but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability for any general system of distribution.
Thomas A. Edison -
When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
Thomas A. Edison
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Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.
Thomas A. Edison -
Absorb ideas from every source.
Thomas A. Edison -
Even though I am nearly deaf, I seem to be gifted with a kind of inner hearing which enables me to detect sounds and noises which the ordinary person does not hear.
Thomas A. Edison -
I will not say I failed 1000 times, I will say that I discovered there are 1000 ways that can cause failure.
Thomas A. Edison -
To Monsieur Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer the Bon Dieu.
Thomas A. Edison -
After we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed to find out anything. I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldnt be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way.
Thomas A. Edison
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Large portions of life's disappointments are individuals who did not understand that they were so near achievement when they surrendered.
Thomas A. Edison -
The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary.
Thomas A. Edison -
Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best.
Thomas A. Edison -
I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.
Thomas A. Edison -
It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.
Thomas A. Edison -
I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'
Thomas A. Edison
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Seeming to do is not doing.
Thomas A. Edison -
Fish seem to be rather conservative around this bay, one seldom catches enough to form the fundamental basis for a lie. Dante left out one of the torments of Hades I could imagine a doomed mortal made to untangle wet fish lines forever. Everybody lost patience at the stupidity of the fish in not coming forward promptly to be murdered.
Thomas A. Edison -
When you become quiet, it just dawns on you.
Thomas A. Edison -
The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around.
Thomas A. Edison -
I can never pick up a thing without wishing to improve it.
Thomas A. Edison -
Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.
Thomas A. Edison
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Sleep is like a drug. Take too much at a time and it makes you dopey. You lose time and opportunities.
Thomas A. Edison -
A genius is a talented person who does his homework.
Thomas A. Edison -
Books will soon be obsolete in the schools... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.
Thomas A. Edison -
We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.
Thomas A. Edison