Quotes about invention (1622 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Man invented clothing to cover the superficial and to discover the inside.”

Andrzej Majewski (1966) Polish writer and photographer

Aphorisms. Magnum in Parvo (2000)

Clothes

“Man invented the car to comfortably sit in jams.”

Andrzej Majewski (1966) Polish writer and photographer

Aphorisms. Magnum in Parvo (2000)

Cars

“Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Deep , Secret , Idea

“I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Men , Thinking

“Invention is the most important product of man's creative brain. The ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of human nature to human needs.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Source: My Inventions

World , Nature

“Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Democracy , Singing , Freedom , Game

“A genius separates himself from things which are not useful nor beneficial. While you are eager to try new technologies—A genius is thinking about how to invent something totally different that will be used by all.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Thinking

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book A Case of Identity

Source: A Case of Identity

Life

“HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)”

Terry Pratchett book Hogfather

Source: Hogfather

Life , Death , Universe

“As an author, my goal is to spread and make sure that the message gets to you. Just like the person who invented the calendar, could not predict what will happen tomorrow.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Personality

“Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Understanding , Time

“What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Life , Death , God , People

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Children , Color , Game , Coffee

“All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.”

Cher (1946) American singer and actress

Imagination

“The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.”

Keith Haring (1958–1990) American artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s b…

Haring – Art in Transit http://www.haring.com/!/selected_writing/haring-art-in-transit#.V1cw0tIrKyw The Keith Haring Foundation

Art , Way , Imagination , Reality

“I love chess, and I didn't invent Fischerandom chess to destroy chess. I invented Fischerandom chess to keep chess going. Because I consider the old chess is dying, it really is dead. A lot of people come up with other rules of chess-type games, with 10x8 boards, new pieces, and all kinds of things. I'm really not interested in that. I want to keep the old chess flavor. I want to keep the old chess game. But just making a change so the starting positions are mixed, so it's not degenerated down to memorization and prearrangement like it is today.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

Radio Interview, June 27 1999 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_08_3.MP3
1990s

Love , People , Game , Change

“… And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., number 168
The Book of Disquiet

Life , Death , Hate , Fear

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

Harvard address (2008)

Imagination

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”

Andrzej Sapkowski book The Last Wish

Source: The Last Wish (1993)

People , Feeling , Thinking , Cheating

“People like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.”

Andrzej Sapkowski book The Last Wish

Geralt
Source: The Last Wish (1993)
Context: “People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”

People

“It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Picasso quoted in 'TIME'; quoted in: The Atlantic, Vol. 214 (1964), p. 97.
Picasso commented on his ambiguous style, or use of multiple styles.
1960s

God , Cats

“Until we invent telepathy, books are our best choice for understanding the rest of humanity.”

Christopher Paolini (1983) American author

Books , Understanding

“Competition becomes transformed into monopoly. The result is immense progress in the socialisation of production. In particular, the process of technical invention and improvement becomes socialised.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

“Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.”

U.G. Krishnamurti book Mind is a Myth

Source: Mind is a Myth (1987), Ch. 4: There Is Nothing To Understand
Context: If you are freed from the goal of the "perfect","godly", "truly religious" then that which is natural in man begins to express itself. Your religious and secular culture has placed before you the ideal man or woman, the perfect human being, and then tries to fit everybody into that mold. It is impossible. Nature does not exist at all. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.

Business , Nature

“What one man can invent, another can discover.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Source: The Adventure of the Dancing Men

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry… no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

Life , Death , Men , War

“Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful -- just stupid.)”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love

People , Stupidity , Hurt

“People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

People , Truth

“As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Religion , Dreams , Thinking

“Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for morality which human beings arbitrarily devise.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

Third Notebook: Part Two
No Longer Human

“The Law teaches that the universe was invented and created by God, and that it did not come into being by chance or by itself.”

Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

Part 1: The Creation of the Universe; Opening sentence
On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

God , Law , Universe , Chance

“Now, of all acts the most complete is that of constructing. A work demands love, meditation, obedience to your finest thought, the invention of laws by your soul, and many other things that it draws miraculously from your own self, which did not suspect that it possessed them. This work proceeds from the most intimate center of your existence, and yet it is distinct from yourself.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Socrates, p. 145
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)

Love , Law , Soul , Drawing

“Is it because Westerners have come to lose their intellectuality through over-developing their capacity for action that they console themselves by inventing theories which set action above everything, and even go so far, as in the case of pragmatism, as to deny that there exists anything of value beyond action; or is the contrary true, that it is the acceptance of this point of view that has led to the intellectual atrophy we see today?”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), p. 47

“I sing in the language of the Heart. It's an invented language that I've had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language.”

Lisa Gerrard (1961) Australian musician, singer and composer

God , Singing , Time , Heart

“Misattributed: [Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no — it must — invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge…”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

This has been reported to be a direct quotation of Dayan in the diaries of Moshe Sharett, but is actually derived from an interpretive commentary by Livia Rokach in "Israel's Sacred Terrorism" (1980) upon statements of Dayan reported in Sharett's diaries, from accounts provided to him by Ya'acob Herzog and Gideon Raphael — in other words, it is a third-hand interpretation of Dayan's meaning, based on a second hand report of his arguments. Sharett's summation of Dayan's statements of 26 May 1955 read: We do not need a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there.... Rokach's interpretive assessment of this diary entry by Sharett produces: The conclusions from Dayan's words are clear: This State has no international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is nonexistent... It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no — it must — invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge.. . . And above all — let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Moshe Dayan / Misattributed
The Iron Wall (1999)

Revenge

“The kind of mathematics foisted on children in schools is not meaningful, fun, or even very useful. This does not mean that an individual child cannot turn it into a valuable and enjoyable personal game. For some the game is scoring grades; for others it is outwitting the teacher and the system. For many, school math is enjoyable in its repetitiveness, precisely because it is so mindless and dissociated that it provides a shelter from having to think about what is going on in the classroom. But all this proves is the ingenuity of children. It is not a justifications for school math to say that despite its intrinsic dullness, inventive children can find excitement and meaning in it.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

Children , School , Game , Mathematics

“People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"How the Poor Die" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/Poor_Die/english/e_pdie, Now (November 1946)

Death , Pain , War , People

“God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.”

Jean Paul Sartre book The Devil and the Good Lord

Act 10, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)

Men , God , Solitude , Evil

“I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organization we deserve victory. … You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. … We must dare to invent the future.”

Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) President of Upper Volta

From 1985 interview with Swiss Journalist Jean-Philippe Rapp, translated from Sankara: Un nouveau pouvoir africain by Jean Ziegler. Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions Pierre-Marcel Favre, 1986. In Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-87. trans. Samantha Anderson. New York: Pathfinder, 1988. pp. 141-144.

Courage , Change , Future , Victory

“It is contradictory to say that the same person can be at the same time ruler and ruled. … The great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves; and the people are the more inclined to believe this as they are flattered by it, as they are in any case incapable of sufficient reflection to see its impossibility. It was to create this illusion that “universal suffrage” was invented: the law is supposed to be made by the opinion of the majority, but what is overlooked is that this opinion is something that can very easily be guided and modified; it is always possible, by means of suitable suggestions, to arouse in it currents moving in this or that direction as desired. We cannot recall who it was that first spoke of “manufacturing opinion,” but this expression is very apt.”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), p. 93

People , World , Law , Universe

“Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Imagination , History , Understanding , Question

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

John Green book The Fault in Our Stars

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Love , Death , War , People

“A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell — mouths mercy, and invented hell — mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!”

Mark Twain book The Mysterious Stranger

The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

Life , God , Children , People

“Few men are controlled by reason, and few are pleased by a right purpose. The mob, rather, is led to what was plainly invented for oblivion of its cares. For it supposes that whatever serves its pleasure must also be linked to the happiness of the age. Therefore, let us grant the expenses, and not be forever giving from rational considerations. Sometimes it is useful to play the fool, and so control the joys the people long for.”

Cassiodorus Variae

Bk. 3, no. 51; pp. 70-71.
Variae

Men , People , Pleasure , Age

“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

Source: 1790s, The Age of Reason, Part II (1795), Chapter III: Conclusion.

Religion , Heart

“Art… is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 42

Life , Women , Food , Art

“Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt

The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Nature

“A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Ordinary Men and Women
Naked Lunch (1959)
Context: The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.

“If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture”

Oscar Wilde book The Decay of Lying

The Decay of Lying (1889)
Context: If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture... In a house, we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Nature

“An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in "inventing" something. It's an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)
Context: My book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, reproduced Hokusai's print of the Great Wave, the famous picture with Mt. Fuji in the background, and also mentioned other unrecognized examples of fractality in art and engineering. Initially, I viewed them as amusing but not essential. But I changed my mind as innumerable readers made me aware of something strange. They made me look around and recognize fractals in the works of artists since time immemorial. I now collect such works. An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in "inventing" something. It's an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered.

Waiting

“I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity. I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the centre of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.”

Joaquin Phoenix (1974) American actor, music video director, producer, musician, and social activist

"Joaquin Phoenix's Oscars speech in full: 'We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby'" https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/10/joaquin-phoenixs-oscars-speech-in-full, The Guardian (February 10, 2020).

Baby , Personality , People , Nature

“There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Art

“America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense… human rights invented America.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Presidency (1977–1981), Farewell Address (1981)
Context: America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America.
Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea.
Context: I have just been talking about forces of potential destruction that mankind has developed, and how we might control them. It is equally important that we remember the beneficial forces that we have evolved over the ages, and how to hold fast to them.
One of those constructive forces is enhancement of individual human freedoms through the strengthening of democracy, and the fight against deprivation, torture, terrorism and the persecution of people throughout the world. The struggle for human rights overrides all differences of color, nation or language.
Those who hunger for freedom, who thirst for human dignity, and who suffer for the sake of justice — they are the patriots of this cause.
I believe with all my heart that America must always stand for these basic human rights — at home and abroad. That is both our history and our destiny.
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America.
Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea. Our social and political progress has been based on one fundamental principle — the value and importance of the individual. The fundamental force that unites us is not kinship or place of origin or religious preference. The love of liberty is a common blood that flows in our American veins.

Sense

“I don't believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.”

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) Italian film director, poet, writer and intellectual

Men , Hope , Happiness

“If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.”

Robert Browning Men and Women

"Fra Lippo Lippi", line 217.
Men and Women (1855)
Source: The Poems of Robert Browning

God , Beauty

“Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Nature

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me and then show me the place where he was hanged.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Variant: Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged.
Source: Justine

Heart

“Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

People

“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)
Source: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Human subtlety…will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Richter II p. 126 no. 837 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=A7dUhbBfmzMC&pg=PA126
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting

Beauty , Nature

“Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Religion , Fools

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!”

William Shakespeare Henry V

Source: Henry V

“No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up to the evolutionary ladder.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

World , Intelligence

“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

Light , Reading

“There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

People

“The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 1: The Value of Scepticism

Hell

“Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”

William Blake Auguries of Innocence

Source: 1800s, Auguries of Innocence (1803), Line 53

Truth

“The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant translation: In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history" — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

Way , Star , Universe , Time

“But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who's stopping us from inventing one?”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

World , Sense

“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world… enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Source: Speeches And Letters Of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 1865

World , Art , Communication , Time

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Pleasure

“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise (1984)

Life

“… for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Source: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Housing

“i wondered if i would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself..”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Life , Way

“The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Books

“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 74

Universe , Night

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sad , Laughter , Suffering

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

“The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Source: My Inventions (1919)
Context: The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention. It is the most important product of his creative brain. Its ultimate purpose is the complete mastery of mind over the material world, the harnessing of the forces of nature to human needs. This is the difficult task of the inventor who is often misunderstood and unrewarded. But he finds ample compensation in the pleasing exercises of his powers and in the knowledge of being one of that exceptionally privileged class without whom the race would have long ago perished in the bitter struggle against pitiless elements. Speaking for myself, I have already had more than my full measure of this exquisite enjoyment; so much, that for many years my life was little short of continuous rapture.

Dependency

“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Love , Feeling

“Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"Fear, the Foundation of Religion"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Context: Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hears can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

World , Support , Thinking , Effort

“High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

Kiss , Funny

“It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed."
"That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.”

Terry Pratchett book Witches Abroad

Source: Witches Abroad

Justice

“It is absolutely critical that we understand this is not just a challenge, it's an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily, here in the United States.
It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades.
And we can do it, but we're going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we've got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.
And that's why we've got to make some investments and I've called for investments in solar, wind, geothermal.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Comments on energy and environmental policies, in the Second Presidential Debate (7 October 2008) http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/presidential.debate.transcript
2008

Way , Communication , Understanding , Future

“What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
1930s-1951

Dreams , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“Whenever I look at TV and I see the weapon I invented to defend my motherland in the hands of these bin Ladens, I ask myself the same question: "How did it get into their hands?" I didn't put it in the hands of bandits and terrorists, and it's not my fault that it has mushroomed uncontrollably across the globe. Can I be blamed that they consider it the most reliable weapon?”

Mikhail Kalashnikov (1919–2013) Soviet and Russian small arms designer

"The Man Who Invented The AK-47 Has Died — Here's His Greatest Regret" by Adam Taylor, in Business Insider (23 December 2013) http://www.businessinsider.com/mikhail-kalashnikovs-death-and-his-greatest-regret-2013-12#ixzz2oW7igOTn

Question

“Borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians.”

Jean-Claude Juncker (1954) Luxembourgian politician

To the European Forum Alpbach. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/national-borders-are-the-worst-invention-ever-says-ec-chief-jean-claude-juncker-a7204006.html (22 August 2016)
2016

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Men , Affliction , Time

“There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Poe stating his arguments that Maelzel's Chess-Player was a hoax. Maelzel's Chess-Player http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/maelzel.htm, Southern Literary Journal (April 1836).