EDWIN LAND

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

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

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

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

Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.

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

If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.

Politeness is the poison of collaboration.

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.

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.

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. 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.

Does an American, when he represents all Americans, have to tell the truth at any cost? The answer is yes, and the consequence of the answer is that our techniques for influencing the rest of the world cannot be rich and flexible like the techniques of our competitors. We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.

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

People who have a new idea often just stop having an old idea.

The fact that civilization is becoming more intricate must not mean that we treat men for a longer period as immature. Does it not mean, perhaps, the opposite: that we must skillfully make them mature sooner, that we must find ways of handling the intricacy of our culture?

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off.

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.

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?

I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.

My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is: Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

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.