Edwin Land Quotes

Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.

In this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

We took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren't particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren't hard.

You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you're living through it.

One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs ... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.

I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.

There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!

Fifty years after we undertook to make the first synthetic polarizers we find them the essential layer in digital liquid-crystal. And thirty four years after we undertook to make the first instant camera and film, our kind of photography has become ubiquitous.

The very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be.

A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.

Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?

The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.

True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically
we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.

The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.

In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance.

In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.

Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.

[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.

The present is the past biting into the future.

The world belongs to the articulate.

Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it.

The world is like a fertile field that's waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.

I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.

As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities.

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

We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals