Ira Gershwin Quotes

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.

Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.

Galileo called doubt the father of invention; it is certainly the pioneer.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner.

I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me.

Human progress has always been driven by a sense of adventure and unconventional thinking.

I'm not a pirate. I'm an innovator.

Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

Like all pioneers I have labored more in faith and hope.

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists.

If people like Edison had waited to make every - or Ben Franklin or some of those people had waited to solve every problem on Earth before they did their research or before they were curious about doing something new, we'd never have made a lot of the progress we have.

The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.

Sometimes you just can't be afraid to wear a different hat. If Columbus had complied, this whole world might still be flat.

Yeah, I know he discovered the West Indies; it wasn't America. But the whole thing with Columbus was that people had been telling him, 'Don't go. The world's flat.' But he kept going. He found land.

Pioneering is the work of individuals.

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

Christopher Columbus, who said to Queen Isabella, No, you got it wrong! The world is round. You're flat! Never got a dinner!

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.

I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.