Top 351 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas A. Edison - Page 6

No Such Thing as Bad Results

I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as 'more of a sponge than an inventor

The Bible of nature is the best damn Bible in the world. Its laws are perfect and grand, and all the prayers in the world can't change them. There is intelligence and law in this world, and there may be supreme intelligence and law, but so far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is all a damned fake.

I love great music and art, but I think 'cubist' songs and paintings are hideous.

When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right.

We tried some experiments in mind reading which were not very successful. Think mind reading contrary to common sense, wise provision of the Bon Dieu that we cannot read each others minds, twould stop civilization and everybody would take to the woods. In fifty or hundred thousand centuries when mankind have become perfect by evolution then perhaps this sense could be developed with safety to the state.

The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization.... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation

Problems in human engineering will receive during the coming years the same genius and attention which the nineteenth century gave to the more material forms of engineering. We have laid good foundations for industrial prosperity, now we want to assure the happiness and growth of the workers through vocational education, vocational guidance, and wisely managed employment departments. A great field for industrial experimentation and statemanship is opening up.

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.

The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change.

It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.

Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.

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.

I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.

We have merely scratched the surface of the store of knowledge which will come to us. I believe that we are now, a-tremble on the verge of vast discoveries - discoveries so wondrously important they will upset the present trend of human thought and start it along completely new lines .

The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan's principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.

I never knew I had an inventive talent until Phrenology told me so. I was a stranger to myself until then!

Interest is the invention of Satan.

I told [Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted "Mary had a little lamb," etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. On first words spoken on a phonograph.

Let the public throw bouquets to the inventors and in time we will all be happy.

The entity that gives life and motion to the human body is finer still and lies infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When this entity deserts the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder - deserted, motionless, dead.

I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.

It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.

An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.

Books will soon be obsolete in the schools... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 foundations and individual donors whose priorities don't align with my organization's.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. As a result, a genius is often a talented person who has simply done all of his homework.

Radio is just a fashion contrivance that will soon die out. It is obvious that there never will be invented a proper receiver!

Fooling around with alternating currents is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever. It's too dangerous . . . it could kill a man as quick as a bolt of lightning. Direct current is safe.

Perhaps dandruff is the excreta of the mind ? the quantity of this material being directly proportional to the amount of reading one indulges in. A book on German metaphysics would thus easily ruin a dress suit.

I have not failed 10,000 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work.

I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles.

As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.

Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.

That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt. Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 - that is what it amounts to, with interest.

Because ideas have to be original only with regard to their adaptation to the problem at hand, I am always extremely interested in how others have used used them.

It is the people who constitute the basis of Government credit. Why then cannot the people have benefit of their own gilt-edge credit by receiving non-interest bearing currency-instead of bankers receiving the benefit of the people's credit in interest-bearing bonds. If the United States Government will adopt this policy of increasing its national wealth without contributing to the interest collector-for the whole national debt is made up on interest charges-then you will see an era of progress and prosperity in this country such as could never have come otherwise.

Of all my inventions, I liked the phonograph best

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.

I am afraid of radium and polonium ... I don't want to monkey with them.

It is very different to make a practical system and to introduce it. A few experiments in the laboratory would prove the practicability of system long before it could be brought into general use. You can take a pipe and put a little coal in it, close it up, heat it and light the gas that comes out of the stem, but that is not introducing gas lighting. I'll bet that if it were discovered to-morrow in New York that gas could be made out of coal it would be at least five years before the system would be in general use.

I know of over 3,000 ways [that] a light bulb does not work.

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.

Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off... All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.

I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly.

Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.

My mother was the making of me.

It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it!

The memory of my mother will always be a blessing to me.

I never failed. It just didn't work 10,000 times.

If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.