20th-century inventor Quotes

Sergei Eisenstein

Elon Musk

Hedy Lamarr

Jonas Salk

George Antheil

Léon Theremin

Theo Jansen

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds, and few go beyond them.

Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language

Since the beginning of time, mankind has considered it as an expression of its Earthly weakness and inadequacy to be bound to the Earth, to be unable to free itself from the mysterious shackles of gravity.

Herman Potočnik

An important part of invention today is being able to discover the problem.

Jerome H. Lemelson

It's only when you suddenly stop perspiring that your forearms go dull.

The job of the inventors is to provide the lead for a lagging system.

I was fortunate that my parents were bright, loving people who did everything they could to help me. I'm glad I was able to play baseball and soccer. I'm gratified that I was a smart boy who went to MIT. But looking back, I know there was anger and dislocation. I'm glad I've been able to overcome that, as many other immigrant kids have as well. But some haven't. Some have dysfunctional and destructive families. Some are bitter. Some are blamers. Some are just crazy – call them sociopaths if you prefer — and their alienation has brought out the worst in them. Instead of filing a lawsuit when they felt wronged, as I have done, they bought guns. This is the nation we live in.

Shiva Ayyadurai

I became more and more interested in the mechanics of creativity...

Genrich Altshuller

It is electromagnetism (EM) in all its many forms that has been so basic, that haunts us and guides us.

My voice sounded like one of the guinea fowl that screeched in our trees as it pooped, but I never let that stop me.

William Kamkwamba

The pilots I worked with in the aerospace industry were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe in case of a crash, but regular people in cars don't want to be uncomfortable even for a minute.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

Sergei Eisenstein

People have been making love and having sex in space over the thousands of years that our ancestors lived and traveled in small hunting-and-gathering bands. Earth is in Space.

I was interested in making a different kind of instrument. And I wanted, of course, to make an apparatus that would be controlled in space, exploiting electrical fields, and that would use little energy. Therefore I used electronic technology to create a musical instrument that would provide greater resources.

We learn, when we learn, only from experience, and then we only learn from our mistakes. Our successes only serve to reinforce our superstitions.

Arthur Jones (inventor)

The pressures for human cloning are powerful; but, although it seems likely that somebody, at some time, will attempt it, we need not assume that it will ever become a common or significant feature of human life.

The flower of life blooms in love and radiates love all around it.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

I judge things from an evolutionary perspective — "How does this serve and contribute to the process of our own evolution?" — rather than think of good and evil in moral terms. I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.

The worlds of thought and action overlap. What you think has a way of becoming true.

Sophia Loren would be a glamour girl even if she were in rags selling fish. She has the look, the movement and the intellect.

There will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be able to do everything [...] One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life.