Edison Quotes

1. "Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?"
Author: Al Boliska

2. "Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris."
Author: Al Jardine

3. "I had moved out of the Edison Hotel because I couldn't pay the bill and was living at the Lincoln Hotel, where I couldn't pay the bill either, but it was cheaper."
Author: Allan Sherman

4. "Thomas Edison said in allseriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labour ofthinking"-if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts thatbolster up what we already think-and ignore all the others! We want only the facts thatjustify our acts-the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justifyour preconceived prejudices!As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desiresseems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage."Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems?Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, ifwe went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot ofpeople in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that twoplus two equals five-or maybe five hundred!"
Author: Dale Carnegie

5. "No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing.Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb."
Author: Daniel Quinn

6. "You want to be the first to do something. You want to create something. You want to innovate something...I often think of Edison inventing the light bulb. That's what I want to do. I want to drive over the bridge coming out of New York there and look down on that sea of lights that is New Jersey and say, `Hey, I did that!'"
Author: David Keirsey

7. "43. Don't let past failures determine what your future success will be. Walt Disney went bankrupt — twice — before finally gaining lasting momentum. The Beatles were rejected from numerous record labels, as was Tom Petty. Thomas Edison failed at creating the light bulb ten thousand times before getting it right! If he used failure as an indicator of his true path, you might be reading this by candlelight."
Author: Derek Rydall

8. "I have two mini huskies called Woody Guthrie and Edison Guthrie."
Author: Dhani Harrison

9. "One of my other nicknames was Thomas Edison, because I invented so many moves."
Author: Earl Monroe

10. "The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?"
Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky

11. "The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn't a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn't even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this." Oshima brings his two hands together tightly. "But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us."
Author: Haruki Murakami

12. "You don't get drown by falling into a river. You get drown by remaining there. Falling accidentally and rising immediately was what distinguished Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln from the rest."
Author: Israelmore Ayivor

13. "Twas Thomas Edison did declare that waste is worse than loss yet never thought it fit to pare his first name to Tomás"
Author: John Alejandro King

14. "So I now she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there." I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful."
Author: John Green

15. "When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures."
Author: John Powell

16. "As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day—though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed."
Author: John Taylor Gatto

17. "My first hero was Thomas Edison, whose adult life had consisted entirely of free time."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

18. "There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something. —THOMAS EDISON, INVENTOR"
Author: Josh Kaufman

19. "Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right... wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence."
Author: Larry Ellison

20. "Whoa, that's the kind of little sister I can dig!" said Edison."Yes, we're all alike," I said. "We cover for you, we lie for you, we take the heat for you. We clean up your messes and mollify our parents for you. We never fail to come across with undying adoration, whether or not you deserve it, and we can't take our lives as seriously as yours. We snuffle up the crumbs from your table on the rare occasions you notice we're alive."
Author: Lionel Shriver

21. "If you are to use Alexander Graham Bell's product, which is to say the blower, you should, in all courtesy, use it as he would have wished; and Dr Bell insisted that all phone calls should begin with the words ‘Ahoy, ahoy'. Nobody knows why he insisted this – he had no connection to the navy – but insist he did and started every phone call that way. Nobody else did, and it was at the suggestion of his great rival Edison that people took to saying ‘Hello'. This seems unfair."
Author: Mark Forsyth

22. "To me, Arnold was a pioneer in the spirit of Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin, while Tiger is a pioneer in the spirit of Bill Gates."
Author: Mark McCormack

23. "We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight."
Author: Milton Berle

24. "Edison failed 10,000 times before he made the electric light. Do not be discouraged if you fail a few times."
Author: Napoleon Hill

25. "Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison."
Author: Neal Stephenson

26. "If he [Thomas Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, but would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of a bee, to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … Just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor."
Author: Nikola Tesla

27. "Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility."
Author: Nikola Tesla

28. "I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work."
Author: Nikola Tesla

29. "Op die manier is de elektrische stoel uitgevonden. Uitgedokterd door Edison die de gevaren van de wisselstroom wilde tonen en zijn idee vervolgens verkocht aan de Sing-sing-gevangenis waarop het tot op de dag van vandaag wordt gebruikt. Heerlijk, vind je niet? Als de wereld niet zo prachtig was, zouden we allemaal nog cynici worden."
Author: Paul Auster

30. "The attitude which the man in the street unconsciously adopts towards science is capricious and varied. At one moment he scorns the scientist for a highbrow, at another anathematizes him for blasphemously undermining his religion; but at the mention of a name like Edison he falls into a coma of veneration. When he stops to think, he does recognize, however, that the whole atmosphere of the world in which he lives is tinged by science, as is shown most immediately and strikingly by our modern conveniences and material resources. A little deeper thinking shows him that the influence of science goes much farther and colors the entire mental outlook of modern civilised man on the world about him."
Author: Percy Williams Bridgman

31. "Americans understand that one of our great national strengths is innovation. Great innovators - Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others - are household names."
Author: Robert Hormats

32. "What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years."
Author: Stephen Leacock

33. "Bitter? Nah. Parafrazandu-l pe Edison, n-am esuat la "the dating game", doar am gasit 10.000 de femei care nu merg."
Author: Teodor Burnar

34. "Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology."
Author: Walter Isaacson

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