Quotes about invention
page 6

“Society will oscillate between long periods of relative stagnation in which state-protected privileges crowd out experiments in the organization of production and brief interludes in which much is destroyed before anything can be created. To perpetuate the practice of innovation, societies must replace such drastic and violent swings with a more constant liquefaction of deals and privileges. They must invent the structures that make structures easier to change.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 192

Change

“Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 12, Writing About Yourself: The Memoir, p. 99.

Truth, Art

“Milton's Paradise Lost is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain, that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Preface to Translations from Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace, in Sylvæ: or, The second part of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Mr. Dryden, third edition (London, 1702).

“It must not be forgotten that the rules of Courts of equity are not, like the rules of the common law, supposed to have been established from time immemorial. It is perfectly well known that they have been established from time to time — altered, improved, and refined from time to time. In many cases we know the names of the Chancellors who invented them.”

George Jessel (jurist) (1824–1883) British politician

In re Hallett's Estate (1880) 13 Ch.D. 696, 710.

Law, Time

“Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

July 6, 1763, p. 120
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I

Exercises, Imagination

“I have been strongly influenced by the Mahabharata, discourses of the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo and Plato. My masters have been Vyasa, Buddha and Sri Aurobindo, as elucidated by Ram Swarup. … Paganism was a term of contempt invented by Christianity for people in the countryside who lived close to and in harmony with Nature, and whose ways of worship were spontaneous as opposed to the contrived though-categories constructed by Christianity’s city-based manipulators of human minds. In due course, the term was extended to cover all spiritually spontaneous culture of the world – Greek, Roman, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, native American. It became a respectable term for those who revolted against Christianity in the modern West. But it has yet to recover its spiritual dimension which Christianity had eclipsed. For me, Hinduism preserves ancient Paganism in all its dimensions. In that sense, I am a Pagan. The term "Polytheism' comes from Biblical discourse, which has the term 'theism' as its starting point. I have no use for these terms. They create confusion. I dwell in a different universe of discourse which starts with 'know thyself' and ends with the discovery, 'thou art that'…
I met her [Mother Theresa] briefly in Calcutta in 1954 or 1955 when she was unknown. I had gone to see an American journalist who was a friend and had fallen ill, when she came to his house asking for money for her charity set-up. The friend went inside to get some cash, leaving his five or six year old daughter in the drawing room. Teresa told her, "He is not your real father. Your real father is in heaven." The girl said, "He is very ill." Theresa commented, "If he dies, your father does not die. For your real father who is in heaven never 'dies."”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

The girl was in tears. Interview, The Observer. Date : February 22, 1997. http://sathyavaadi.tripod.com/truthisgod/Articles/goel.htm https://egregores.blogspot.com/2009/10/buddha-sri-aurobindo-and-plato.html https://egregores.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/hindus-and-pagans-a-return-to-the-time-of-the-gods/

Money, People, World, Art

“A computer that issues a rate demand for nil dollars and nil cents (and a notice to appear in court if you do not pay immediately) is not a maverick machine. It is a respectable and badly programmed computer… Mavericks are machines that embody theoretical principles or technical inventions which deviate from the mainstream of computer development, but are nevertheless of value.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Microman: Computers and the Evolution of Consciousness (1982), p. 133 as cited in: Jon Bird and Ezequiel Di Paolo (2008) " Gordon Pask and His Maverick Machines http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/ezequiel/Husbands_08_Ch08_185-212.pdf", In: The Mechanical Mind in History, 2008.

Appearance

“Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), I

Lovers, Kiss, Time

“You mean to tell me that Jamaicans invented sugar, reggae and the best drug on Earth and the white man makes all the money!?”

Chris Rock (1965) American comedian, actor, screenwriter, television producer, film producer, and director

Never Scared (Album Version, 2005)

Money

“On the reverse side, we have failed to give the immigrant accessibility to American traditions, beliefs, art, and literature. He has had little cooperative participation in the creation, maintenance, and management of our economic forces. He has not been permitted to incorporate into the processes of American invention and research the processes of his own genius.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Art, Literature

“Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s

Hope, Idea, Change

“I think they've always gone on. I've gotten some irate letters from oldsters saying "We did this in the 1930s. You didn't invent anything." And I'm like, "Gramps, you should have put a name on it and sold it, because that’s all I did."”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

On the creation of Fight Club
Interview with Rolling Stone (2002-09-19)

Thinking

“… man is the animal that moralizes. Man is also the animal that complains about being one, and says that there is an animal, a beast inside him—that he is brother to dragons. (He is certainly a brother to wolves, and to pandas too, but he is father to dragons, not brother: they, like many gods and devils, are inventions of his.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“On the Underside of the Stone”, p. 177
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

God, Animals

“If the advancement of the general art of programming requires the continuing invention and elaboration of paradigms, advancement of the art of the individual programmer requires that he expand his repertory of paradigms.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

The Paradigms of Programming (1979)

Art

“We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. … In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Postmodernism and truth (1998)

Truth, Family, Food, Way

“Our mathematical concepts, structures, ideas have been invented as tools to organise the phenomena of the physical, social and mental world. Phenomenology of a mathematical concept, structure, or idea means describing it in its relation to the phenomena for which it was created, and to which it has extended in the learning process of mankind, and, as far as this description is concerned with the learning process of the young generation, it is didactical phenomenology, a way to show the teacher the places where the learner might step into the learning process of mankind.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. ix

World, Way, Mathematics, Idea

“To Brandeis, as to Jefferson, the key to a successful democracy lies in the spirit, the vitality, the daring, the inventiveness of its citizens.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

Vincent Blasi, The First Amendment And The Ideal of Civic Courage: The Brandeis Opinion in Whitney v. California, 29 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 653, 686 (1988).

Democracy, Success

“John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct…What struck me… was the related idea that human thought is a reaction to frustrated habit— what people often do when the outcome of their action disappoints their expectation. I concluded that unthinking, habitual action is the natural and truly happy way of life; whereas thought is a symptom of dysfunction but conducive to survival all the same since, every so often, new thoughts find ways of escaping the frustration that provoked them by inventing satisfying new ways to get things done.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (2005)

Life, People, Disappointment, Way

“Just pop it on your wrist. - Ricky asks Karl how his 'invention' of a watch that counts down your life would actually work.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 1 Episode 5
On Technology

Life

“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Soul, Nature

“It is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Age, Failure, Effort

“An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. 'Totalitarian state' is merely the modern name for tyranny.”

Max Eastman (1883–1969) American activist

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), p. 18

“It was this indifference to the quality of his material that earned Liszt the contempt of his most distinguished contemporaries and of many of the most respectable critics and historians of posterity. It was, nevertheless, his greatest strength. It made it possible for him to manipulate the material ruthlessly, to concentrate on effects of realization with unprecedented intensity, and to integrate styles and techniques of performance into composition in a new way. His invention of novel keyboard effects and his mastery of musical gesture have always been undervalued, especially by pianists of the German school who prefer the kind of music that can be executed while soulfully regarding the ceiling. On the whole, the most genuine understanding of his music has been displayed by musicians of eastern Europe, and he may almost be considered as the founder of Russian pianism.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 8 : Liszt: On Creation as Performance

School, Music, Way, Understanding

“The result of the mathematician's creative work is demonstrative reasoning, a proof; but the proof is discovered by plausible reasoning, by guessing. If the learning of mathematics reflects to any degree the invention of mathematics, it must have a place for guessing, for plausible inference.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Induction and Analogy in Mathematics (1954)

Mathematics, Learning

“We focus on building innovation and inventing technology futures and we figure that it will take care of the rest. So far, it's done wonders.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

On financial planning at a speech at the Smithsonian.

Future

“We do not live that we may become more godlike. We become more godlike that we may live. We turn to the future to live in the present. The practices by which we invent different futures bring down upon us a storm of impalpable meteors. The risks to which these practices subject us, the commotions, the hurts, the joys, strike and break the coats of armor within which we are all slowly dying. They enable each of us to live in action and in the mind until he dies all at once.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 236-7.

Future, Joy, Hurt

“The aesthetics of painting were always in a state of development parallel to the development of painting itself. They influenced each other and vice versa. But all of the sudden, in that famous turn of the century [1900] a few people thought they could take the bull by the horns and invent an aesthetic beforehand. After immediately disagreeing with each other, they began to form all kinds of groups, each with the idea of freeing art... The question as they saw it, was not so much what you could paint, but what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that the subject matter came into existence as something you ought not to have.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

People, Art, Mountain, Idea

“Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians (April 2011) http://lesswrong.com/lw/5c0/epistle_to_the_new_york_less_wrongians/

People, Optimism

“Thus, the founders of grammar were Sîbawayh and, after him, al-Fârisî and Az-Zajjâj. All of them were of non-Arab (Persian) descent. They were brought up in the Arabic language and acquired the knowledge of it through their upbringing and through contact with Arabs. They invented the rules of (grammar) and made it into a discipline (in its own right) for later (generations to use). Most of the ḥadîth scholars who preserved traditions for the Muslims also were Persians, or Persian in language and upbringing, because the discipline was widely cultivated in the 'Irâq and the regions beyond. Furthermore all the scholars who worked in the science of the principles of jurisprudence were Persians. The same applies to speculative theologians and to most Qur'ân commentators. Only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus, the truth of the following statement by the Prophet becomes apparent: 'If scholarship hung suspended in the highest parts of heaven, the Persians would attain it.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. 1, pp. 429-430, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

Truth, Knowledge, Science, Parting

“String theory was not invented to describe gravity; instead it originated in an attempt to describe the strong interactions, wherein mesons can be thought of as open strings with quarks at their ends. The fact that the theory automatically described closed strings as well, and that closed strings invariably produced gravitons and gravity, and that the resulting quantum theory of gravity was finite and consistent is one of the most appealing aspects of the theory.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Einstein and the Search for Unification", p. 10 https://books.google.com/books?id=rEaUIxukvy4C&pg=PA10, in The legacy of Albert Einstein: a collection of essays in celebration of the year of physics (2007)

Strong

“The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a Man's genius, I hope, with a God over him!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

God, Hope

“In order to this, I found it absolutely necessary to consider this Subject entirely anew, as if it had never been treated of before; the Principles of the old Perspective being so narrow, and so confined, that they could be of no use in my Design: And I was forced to invent new Terms of Art, those already in use being so peculiarly adapted to the imperfect Notions that have hitherto been had of this Art, that I could make no use of them in explaining those general Principles I intended to establish.”

Brook Taylor (1685–1731) English mathematician

New Principles of Linear Perspective (1715, 1749)

Art

“Invention flags, his brain goes muddy,
And black despair succeeds brown study.”

William Congreve (1670–1729) British writer

"An Impossible Thing", line 105 (1720)

Study, Despair

“Isaac Newton only discovered the law of gravity. He didn’t invent it, did he? In the same way, the Knowledge is within you. I can reveal it. I cannot give it to you from somewhere else. … If somebody comes to me I am sure I can give him the Knowledge and he will be satisfied.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Glastonbury, England Midsummer Festival, June 21, 1971
1970s

Law, Way, Knowledge

“This book… is primarily and essentially an account of the discovery or invention of mathematical concepts, and the historical material is… divided and classified, neither chronologically nor biographically, but philosophically.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Books, Mathematics

“Marcello Dell'Utri is right: Mangano was a hero, because he never invented anything about me.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

Statement during a television show on La7 (9 April 2008)
2007

“The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Come Back, Dizzy" (p.187)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Birth, Dead

“You practice so you can invent. Discipline? No. The joy of practicing leads you to the celebration of the creation.”

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) American pianist and poet

Soure: Films on Demand, Films for the Humanities & Sciences, Films Media Group, & MVD Entertainment Group. (2011). Cecil Taylor All the Notes. New York, N.Y.: Films Media Group.

Joy

“Mr. Arkwright, after many years intense and painful application, invented, about the year 1768, his present method of spinning cotton, but upon very different principles from any invention that had gone before it. He was himself a native of Lancashire; but having so recently witnessed the ungenerous treatment of poor Hargrave, by the people of that county, he retired to Nottingham, and obtained a patent in the year 1769, for making cotton, flax, and wool into yarn. But, after some experience, finding that the common method of preparing the materials for spinning (which is essentially necessary to the perfection of good yarn) was very imperfect, tedious, and expensive, he turned his thoughts towards the construction of engines for that purpose; and, in the pursuit, spent several years of intense study and labour, and at last produced an invention for carding and preparing the materials, founded in some measure on the principles of his first machine. These inventions, united, completed his great original plan. But his last machines being very complicated, and containing some things materially different in their construction, and some others materially different in their use, from the inventions for which his first patent was obtained, be procured a patent for these also in December, 1775.”

Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) textile entrepreneur; developer of the cotton mill

Source: The Case of Mr. Richard Arkwright and Co., 1781, p. 23

Pain, Study, Perfection

“The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art & Other Serious Matters, (1985), p. 191, "Saul Steinberg"

Painting

“I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.”

Harrison Birtwistle (1934) British composer

Interviewed by Dan Warburton, July 8, 1995. http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/birtwistle.html

Music, Thinking

“Maula Bakhsh, a peasant, lives in Tamil Nadu and speaks Tamil. In Andhra Pradesh he speaks Telugu. In Bengal, his language is Bengali. Do we think of such a Muslim for whom I have invented the name Maula Bakhsh. Jinnah, Khaliquz Zaman, Maulana Azad, the Aga Khan, M. C. Chagla and the Raja of Mehmudabad… were Muslims. So was Hakku, the elderly grandmother of our locality. She prays 5 times a day. She was so deeply moved by one of Gandhi's speeches that she would repeat his name after Allah and His Prophet. At the age of 70, she stitched her own khadi kafan, because she did not want her body to be wrapped and then buried in a foreign cloth. So when people discuss India's Muslims, I wonder who are they talking about. Maula Bakhsh? Jinnah and Co.? Or Hakku?”

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914–1987) Film director, Screenwriter, Novelist, Journalist

'Maula Bakhsh bhi ek Hindustani Mussalman hai', Gagan, in Urdu (Bombay: Mussalman Number, 1975), pp. 96-7 http://web.archive.org/web/20011006030417/http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/010929ij.htm Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since Independence by Mushirul Hasan (1997) C. Hurst & Co. Publishers ISBN 1850653046

People, Age, Thinking, Time

“I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have, fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Quoted by Theodore Dreiser in A Photographic Talk with Edison http://books.google.com/books?id=ZrIYCWaZCjwC&q=%22I+never+did+anything+worth+doing+by+accident%22+%22nor+did+any+of+my+inventions+come+indirectly+through+accident+except+the+phonograph+No+when+I+have+fully+decided+that+a+result+is+worth+getting+I+go+about+it+and+make+trial+after+trial+until+it+comes%22&pg=PA118#v=onepage, Success magazine (February 1898). 1800s

Success, Business

“The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity — perhaps even more so — as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Keep Your Filthy Hands Off The Internet" 20 June 2010.

Exercises

“We've invented most of the stuff that we need and now we're just messing about”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 1 Episode 1
On Technology

“How did I get to Lee Konitz, when everybody else was doing Charlie Parker? The sound, for one thing, the notes that he played—man, it just knocked me off my feet! When Lee was first playing, God he was inventive! I worked out so many solos of his off the records, from when he began recording with Tristano and Warne Marsh in 1949. I listened to Charlie Parker but I was not a fan—he was repeating himself too much.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

As quoted in Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser's Art https://books.google.com/books?id=pc4CsgVHLw0C&pg=PA65 (2008) by Andy Hamilton and Lee Konitz, p. 65

God

“We do not, of course, write literary criticism at all now. Academe has won the battle in which Wilson fought so fiercely on the other side. Ambitious English teachers now invent systems that have nothing to do with literature or life but everything to do with those games that must be played in order for them to rise in the academic bureaucracy. Their works are empty indeed. But then, their works are not meant to be full. They are to be taught, not read. The long dialogue has broken down. Fortunately, as Flaubert pointed out, the worst thing about the present is the future. One day there will be no… But I have been asked not to give the game away. Meanwhile, I shall drop a single hint: Only construct!”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes", closing lines
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Life, Game, Literature, Teachers

“Nowhere in the world of business at the present moment are conditions and methods changing more rapidly than in the work shop and factory itself. The application of new methods of processing, the invention of new tools, and the use of new combinations of cutting steels, are some of the things that in themselves are revolutionizing not only factory practice, but the character and skill of the labor employed; which results in a tendency toward a vast increase in output per capita. These things are in turn all forcing new methods and ways into industrial administration.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 1; First paragraph of the first chapter

World, Way, Business, Change

“He was a bad acquaintance for a placid, sedentary soul like me, for though he could work like a Trojan when the fit took him, he was never at the same job very long. In the same week he would harass an Under-Secretary about horses for the Army, write voluminously to the press about a gun he had invented for potting aeroplanes, give a fancy-dress ball which he forgot to attend, and get into the semi-final of the racquets championship. I waited daily to see him start a new religion.”

John Buchan book The Power-House

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 1 "Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase"

Religion, Soul, Waiting, Horse

“There are photographers who invent, others who discover. Personally, I am interested in discoveries, not for the trials or experiences but to capture life itself. I flee from the dangers of the anecdote and the picturesque, which are very easy and better than sensational, but quite as bad. To my mind, photography has the power to evoke, and must not simply document. We have to be abstract, just like nature.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, To Seize Life: Interview with Yvonne Baby (1961), p. 44

Life, Nature, Personality

“Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age…”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

Youth, Age

“All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i. e. experience. …mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles…”

Immanuel Kant book Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883)
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)

Mathematics, Nature, Knowledge, Thinking

“He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 24

Dogs

“This is a difficult goal to present to teachers, coming as it does at a time when education is under attack from many quarters. But our society is changing rapidly and the difficulties of foreseeing what kinds of skills future generations will require are increasing. Although we have so far depended on the rational, left half of the human brain to plan our children's future and to solve the problems they might encounter on the way to that future, the onslaught of profound change is shaking our confidence in technological thinking and in the old methdods of education. Without abandoning training in tradtional verbal and computational skills, concerned teachers are looking for teaching techniques that will enchance children's intuitive and creative powers, thus preparing students to meet new challenges with flexibility, inventiveness, and imagination and with the ability to grasp complex arrays of interconnected ideas and facts, to perceive underlying patterns of events, and to see old problems in new ways.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Children, Education, Way, Confidence

“It's the kind of movie home video was invented for: Not worth the trip to the theater, but slam it into the VCR and you get your rental's worth.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/my-cousin-vinny-1992 of My Cousin Vinny (13 March 1992) Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Home

“I write this sitting in my hand-built adobe-style home looking out on the Bitterroot Valley… It's a place where the "Old" West and the "New" confront one another daily in often bazarre ways. …I'm sort of a New Westerner myself. Because of relatively recent inventions like solar panels, satellites, cell phones, composting toilets, and four-wheel drive vehicles, I'm able to live where no one has since the Salish had the valley. …perhaps it all just seems new because the prism through which we're accustomed to view the history of the region has only recently been polished sufficiently to gain the deep view.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Way, Home, History

“In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Letters and Social Aims, Quotation and Originality
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“In the modern world we have invented ways of speeding up invention, and people's lives change so fast that a person is born into one kind of world, grows up in another, and by the time his children are growing up, lives in still a different world.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1950s, People and Places (1959), p. 198

Children, People, World, Way

“We did it by playing football. Pure, beautiful, inventive football.”

Jock Stein (1922–1985) Scottish footballer and manager

Lisbon, 1967 (after winning the European Cup) http://www.weekender.co.jp/new/030516/sports_news-030516.html

Beauty, Football

“The real truths are those that can be invented.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Truth

“Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world. That’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true and I think… I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first, and found that without death life didn’t work very well. Because it didn’t make room for the young, who didn’t know how the world was fifty years ago, who didn’t know how the world was twenty years ago. Who saw it as it is today without any preconceptions, and saw and dreamed how it could be based on that. Who were not satisfied based on the accomplishments of the last thirty years, but who were dissatisfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Computer World interview with Daniel Morrow (April 1995)
1990s

Life, Death, World, Dreams

“Scientific Management is not a new "system," something "invented" by a man called F. W. Taylor, a passing novelty." It is something much deeper, an attitude towards the control of human systems of co-operation of all kinds rendered essential by the immense accretion of power over material things ushered in by the industrial revolution…
What Taylor did was not to invent something quite new, but to synthesise and present as a reasonably coherent whole ideas which had been germinating and gathering force in Great Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. He gave to a disconnected series of initiatives and experiments a philosophy and a title; complete unity was not within his scope… It was left to others to extend his philosophy to other functions and especially to Henri Fayol, a Frenchman, to develop logical principles for the administration of a large-scale undertaking as a whole.
It detracts nothing from Taylor's greatness to see him thus as a man who focussed his thought of the preceding age, carried that thought forward with a group of friends and colleagues whose united contribution was so outstanding as to constitute a "golden age" of management in the United States and laid the intellectual foundations on which all subsequent work in Great Britain and many other countries has been based. But it is impossible to understand Taylor's achievement or the significance of Scientific Management for our society, unless his individual work is seen against the background of this larger whole of which it is only a part.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol I. p. 16-17; as cited in: Harry Arthur Hopf. Historical perspectives in management https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009425985. Ossining, N.Y., 1947. p. 4-5 1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Age, Idea, Understanding, Parting

“We sometimes imagine, under the influence of Spenglerian philosophy or some other kind of "historical morphology," that we live in a similar age [to the Romans], the last witnesses of a condemned civilization. But condemned by whom? Not by God, but by some supposed "historical laws." For although we do not know any historical laws, we are in fact able of inventing them quite freely, and such laws, once invented, can then be realized in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

"Looking for the Barbarians"

God, Age, Law, Imagination

“The mazurka provided him with a repertoire of motifs, rhythms, and sonorities outside the main Italian, French, and German traditions of European music: he used it to create a series of works within this tradition which are absolutely personal—marginal works which challenge the center.
They are the most eccentric and original of Chopin's works. We shall never know exactly what and how much Chopin took directly from the popular folk tradition and how much he invented, but it does not matter: his originality is revealed as much in what he selected as in what he imagined. The folk dances gave him the possibility of exploring new harmonies, of exploiting the emotional effect of obsessive repetition, and of developing a new form of rubato.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 7 : Chopin: From the Miniature Genre to the Sublime Style

Music, Imagination, Dance, Personality

“As the history majors among you here today know all too well, when people in power invent their own facts and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole. It is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality. Not just our laws and our rights and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Post Presidential Election, Wellesley Commencement Speech (2017)

People, Law, History, Question

“After all, animal rightists have not invented the vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb in Isaiah 11:6, or the universal command to be vegetarian in Genesis 1:29, or indeed the vision of the earth in a state of childbirth awaiting its deliverance from suffering in Romans 8: in these, and in other ways, animal rightists can claim to be rediscovering and reactualizing visionary elements already present within the Western religious tradition.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), pp. 54-55

Way, Lying, Suffering, Universe

“Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

World, Knowledge, Universe, Science

“The Jew can take the credit for having corrupted the Graeco-Roman world. Previously words were used to express thoughts; he used words to invent the art of disguising thoughts. Lies are his strength, his weapon in the struggle. The Jew is said to be gifted. His only gift is that of juggling with other people's property and swindling each and everyone. Suppose I find by chance a picture that I believe to be a Titian. I tell the owner what I think of it, and I offer him a price. In a similar case, the Jew begins by declaring that the picture is valueless, he buys it for a song and sells it at a profit of 5000 per cent. To persuade people that a thing which has value, has none, and vice versa—that's not a sign of intelligence. They can't even overcome the smallest economic crisis!”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

5 November 1941.
Disputed, Hitler's Table Talks (1941-1944) (published 1953)

People, World, Art, Intelligence

“Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Glen Burns (1983), Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955, Peter Lang GmbH, ISBN 3-8204-7761-6.
Great Poets Howl

“Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Glen Bateman
The Stand (1978)

Love, God, Home

“Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. … To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"August 8th — Earthstar," pages 157-158 The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Love, Life, Hate, World

“I have invented nothing. I have simply documented a magical alchemy that I want to share.”

Gregory Colbert (1960) Canadian photographer

As quoted in "Dances With Whales" by Alan Riding in The New York Times (22 April 2002) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/22/arts/dances-with-whales.html

“Thwarted, or starved, in the important objects proper to young capacities, the boys and young men naturally find or invent deviant objects for themselves. … Their choices and inventions are rarely charming, usually stupid, and often disastrous; we cannot expect average kids to deviate with genius. But on the other hand, the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical and wasted.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 13.

Men, Stupidity, Disappointment, Boy

“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness

“Necessity, the mother of invention.”

George Farquhar (1677–1707) Irish dramatist

The Twin Rivals (1702), Act i. Compare: "Necessity is the mother of invention", Wycherly, Love in a Wood (1672), act iii. sc. 3.; "Art imitates Nature, and necessity is the mother of invention", Richard Franck, Northern Memoirs (written in 1658, printed in 1694); "Magister artis ingenique largitor Venter" (translated: "Hunger is the teacher of the arts and the bestower of invention"), Persius, Prolog., line 10.

“Whoever invented the word ‘grace’ must have seen the wing-folding of the plover.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“May: Back from the Argentine”, p. 34-35.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "May: Back from the Argentine," "June: The Alder Fork," "July: Great Possessions," and "July: Prairie Birthday"

“Things have been invented because of alcohol. Like the taser, okay? Yeah! The morning after pill, okay? The reach-around. Judge Judy. What has pot given the world? Hackey sack? YEAH! Hilarious ring tones? OH GAH! Ultimate Frisbee Championships? It sucks to be a champion at a sport that can't get you laid. It's an unneeded skill like, I dunno, being the best banjo player. Or a squirter.”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

"Captain Miserable"

Alcohol, World, Sport

“Look, in my personal issues I'm very private. I would like to make clear that all the matters of my family, friends, my love life, is something that is for me, and I also prefer people to invent. It amuses me a lot when I read all the things they invent.”

Luis Miguel (1970) Puerto Rican singer; music producer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnQbFJbGfM
Interview with Barbara Bermudo, 2003

Love, Life, People, Family

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling, Sleep, Passion

“You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Cub Reporter" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/3.htm#Cub%20Reporter An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

Learning

“It seems too, that the Method of exacting their Revenues, newly invented by the Lords, diminishes both the Inhabitants, and the Spirit of Agriculture in Russia. Almost all the Villages are heavily taxed. The Lords, who seldom or never reside in their Villages, lay an Impost on every Head of one, two, and even five Rubles, without the least Regard to the Means by which their Peasants may be able to raise this Money.
It is highly necessary that the Law should prescribe a Rule to the Lords, for a more judicious Method of raising their Revenues; and oblige them to levy such a Tax, as tends least to separate the Peasant from his House and Family; this would be the Means by which Agriculture would become more extensive, and Population be more increased in the Empire.”

Catherine the Great (1729–1796) Empress of Russia

Proposals for a New Law Code (1768)

Money, Family, Law, Housing

“Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Stuart Kauffman in: John Brockman ed. (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. p. 209 ( online http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/t-Ch.12.html)

Love, Question, Parting

“The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent on each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is — insofar as it is thinkable at all — primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensible and effective tool of his research.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Contribution in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, p. A. Schilpp, ed. (The Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston, IL (1949), p. 684). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/ 1940s

World, Way, Sense, Appearance

“Some of the most productive times in the histories of nations have been when they were badly stressed — economically, politically, culturally or socially. It's possible to be stressed to a point that more creativity is stimulated than would otherwise be the case. I think it is true that necessity is the mother of invention.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)

History, Thinking, Time

“The idea of interest on loans is the diabolical invention of big loan-capital; it alone makes possible the lazy drone's life of a minority of tycoons at the expense of the productive peoples and their work-potential.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

Life, People, Idea

“If we assume the pre-Flood world had ideal living conditions, their memory, wisdom, and accumulated knowledge would have been incredible! How much could you learn in 900 years?! Add to that the fact that you can go talk with your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who is still living. You can learn from them and build on that knowledge. Plus, don’t forget that Methuselah could have known Adam for 243 years and learned from him; and Adam walked and talked with God Himself for maybe 100 years! I suspect the pre-Flood knowledge and maybe even technology and inventions would blow our minds today!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 56

Wisdom, God, World, Knowledge

“Pure mathematics is much more than an armoury of tools and techniques for the applied mathematician. On the other hand, the pure mathematician has ever been grateful to applied mathematics for stimulus and inspiration. From the vibrations of the violin string they have drawn enchanting harmonies of Fourier Series, and to study the triode valve they have invented a whole theory of non-linear oscillations.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Mathematics, Study

“Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Source: Vol. II, letter to Catherine Crowe (31 January 1841), pp. 441–442 note: Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Clothes

“What I say here is not to give room for believing, that Mr. Savery, who has since published this invention at London, is not actually the inventor. I do not doubt that the same thought may have occurred to him, as well as to others, without having learnt it elsewhere.”

Denis Papin (1647–1713) French physicist, mathematician and inventor

Denis Papin, as quoted by Bernard Forest de Bélidor, Architecture Hydraulique Vol.2 https://books.google.com/books?id=tBkWAAAAYAAJ, p. 309 Tr. Patrick Muirhead, The Life of James Watt https://books.google.com/books?id=MeJUAAAAcAAJ (1859) p. 145