Edwin Land famous quotes

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
-- Edwin Land

#Business #Ideas #Entrepreneur

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.
-- Edwin Land

#Inspiring #Courage #Failure

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Mean #Years #Common Sense

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.
-- Edwin Land

#Important #Impossible #Projects

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Dream #Emotional #Thinking

Politeness is the poison of collaboration.
-- Edwin Land

#Teamwork #Decision #Collaboration

Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.
-- Edwin Land

#Marketing #Advertising

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
-- Edwin Land

#Creativity #Stupidity

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Years #World #Definitions

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals
-- Edwin Land

#Health #Animal #Brain

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Creativity #Creative #Intellectual

There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.
-- Edwin Land

#Creativity #Individuality #Groups

Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.
-- Edwin Land

#Individuality #Mind #Originality

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Important #May #Impossible

A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
-- Edwin Land

#Preparation #World #Unexpected

The bottom line is in heaven!
-- Edwin Land

#Heaven #Lines #Bottom

Don't do anything that someone else can do.
-- Edwin Land

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.
-- Edwin Land

#Photography #Art #Expression

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Believe #Thinking #Years

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Children #Color #Practice

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
-- Edwin Land

#Science #Method

An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.
-- Edwin Land

#Business #Accepted #Invention

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.
-- Edwin Land

#Hard Work #Excess #Anything Worth Doing

The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.
-- Edwin Land

#Inspirational Life #Vision #Important

I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.
-- Edwin Land

#Engineering #Long #Creative

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
-- Edwin Land

#Art #Science #Art And Science

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious. This is true not only for those who have not previously been acquainted with the problem, but also for those who have worked over it for years.
-- Edwin Land

#Years #Research #Problem

Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.
-- Edwin Land

#Science #Rooms #Obstacles

I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.
-- Edwin Land

#Believe #Organization #Research

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.
-- Edwin Land

#Research

The second great product of industry should be the rewarding life for every person
-- Edwin Land

#Life #Should #Persons

Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?
-- Edwin Land

#Creating #Nucleus #Fields

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Asking #Electronics #Revolutionary

We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.
-- Edwin Land

#Patents #Alive #World

I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.
-- Edwin Land

#Dream #Believe #Greatness

[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.
-- Edwin Land

#Memories #Perception #Cameras

There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!
-- Edwin Land

#Fun #Scientist #Circumstances

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Creativity #Cutting #Government

When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.
-- Edwin Land

#Athlete #Past #Games

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.
-- Edwin Land

#Research #Problem #Curious

You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you're living through it.
-- Edwin Land

#Splits #Moments #Composition

The world belongs to the articulate.
-- Edwin Land

#World

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Creative #Economic #Social

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it.
-- Edwin Land

#Missing #Trying #Needs

In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.
-- Edwin Land

#Building #Significance

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Successful #Past #Numbers

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!
-- Edwin Land

#Intellectual #Might #Persuading

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically -- we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!
-- Edwin Land

#Eye #Trying #Use

I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great.
-- Edwin Land

#Believe #Special #Different

I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.
-- Edwin Land

#Play #Mind #Orchestra

Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.
-- Edwin Land

#Photography #Years #Cameras

We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.
-- Edwin Land

#Messages #Dramatic #Persuasive

[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.
-- Edwin Land

#Cameras #Polaroids

Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.
-- Edwin Land

#Our Society

One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it.
-- Edwin Land

#Secret #Way

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.
-- Edwin Land

#Power #Important #Use

You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.
-- Edwin Land

#Thinking #Heaven #Lines

A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.
-- Edwin Land

#Science #Tendencies #Increase

Look, if the picture you get instantly is as beautiful as the picture you get by waiting seven days, then it is absolute madness to say that there is virtue in waiting.
-- Edwin Land

#Beautiful #Photography #Waiting

If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved,
-- Edwin Land

#Important #Able #Problem

The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.
-- Edwin Land

#Tests #Faces #Indifference

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Competition #Important #Way

There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. It is: If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.
-- Edwin Land

#School #Excess #Harvard

The world is like a fertile field that's waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.
-- Edwin Land

#Waiting #World #Fields

A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.
-- Edwin Land

#Mistake #Events #Benefits

True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.
-- Edwin Land

#Creativity #Succession

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.
-- Edwin Land

#Causes #Colour #Consequence

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?
-- Edwin Land

#Thinking #Preparation #Answers

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Mistake #History #Way

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.
-- Edwin Land

#Reality #Perfect #Technique

You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.
-- Edwin Land

#Failure #Succeed

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Organization #Waiting #Special

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.
-- Edwin Land

#Education #Determination #Men

I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.
-- Edwin Land

#Dream #Real #Greatness

The very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be.
-- Edwin Land

#Essence #People #Democracy

In this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.
-- Edwin Land

#Spiritual #Country #Mean

...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.
-- Edwin Land

#Thinking #Two #Add

Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
-- Edwin Land

#Believe #Thinking #Technique

Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn't know they had.
-- Edwin Land

#People #Focus #After Hours