Thomas A. Edison Quotes
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When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes.
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In 'Common Sense' Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again.
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Books will soon be obsolete in the schools... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.
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I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.
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Of the 200 light bulbs that didn't work, every failure told me something that I was able to incorporate into the next attempt.
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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.
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No Such Thing as Bad Results.
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I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.
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Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.
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I have had a lot of success with failure
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The only thing I use my body for is to carry my brain around.
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I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor....'
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We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy - sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
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Most of my ideas belonged to other people who never bothered to develop them.
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The very first thing an executive must have is a fine memory. Of course it does not follow that a man with a fine memory is necessarily a fine executive. But if he has the memory he has the first qualification, and if he has not the memory nothing else matters.
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Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
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Fools call wise men fools. A wise man never calls any man a fool.
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I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of.
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I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph.
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Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
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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.
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I never once made a discovery ... I speak without exaggeration that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light ... Yet in only two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.
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The radio craze will die out in time.
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Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.