Top 86 Quotes & Sayings by Edwin Land - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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?

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

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!

The bottom line is in heaven!

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.

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.

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