Frank Moore Colby Quotes

I don't want a lot of guys like me who played the game. Quite frankly, I want blank canvases; I want people to come in with new ideas. I don't want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process.

None of the great discoveries was made by a 'specialist' or a 'researcher'.

If your mind is at work, we're in danger of reproducing another cliche. If we can keep our minds out of it and our thoughts out of it, maybe we'll come up with something original.

I think a lot of people study the rules too much and then don't know how to be creative.

We allow no geniuses around our Studio.

In a society that tries to standardize thinking, individuality is not highly prized.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

Before I do anything, I think, well what hasn't been seen. Sometimes, that turns out to be something ghastly and not fit for society. And sometimes that inspiration becomes something that's really worthwhile.

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

Since when was genius found respectable?

We love it when we make mistakes that are better than something you could think up.

Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

Imagination should always be treasured, even when it's slightly off-key.

Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.

Creativity can solve almost any problem.

The source of innovation is freedom. All we have - new knowledge, invention - comes from freedom. Discoveries and new knowledge come from freedom. When somebody is responsible only to himself, [has] only himself to satisfy, then you'll have invention, new thought, now product, new design, new ideas.

Ideation is not a synonym for innovation, conformity is not its simple antonym, and innovation is not the automatic consequence of "creative thinking.".

I don't need to feel 100% safe, but I have to feel like there's room for me to go a little bit insane if I'm going to have good ideas. Because a good idea is a new idea and if you start going around like, "I have this new idea!" most people are gonna be like, "I've never heard that before, that sounds fishy."

I think if you study--if you learn too much of what others have done, you may tend to take the same direction as everybody else.

It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.

We need radical thinking, creative ideas, and imagination.

I think being a little nuts is helpful.

Pure innovation is more gross than error.