Pioneering Work Quotes

I always felt that Bette Davis was one of the great screen actresses who never really got her due - she won two Oscars, but the last was in 1938, and that was really before all the great work that she did.

Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.

It seems that I have always been ahead of my time. I had to wait nineteen years before Niagara was harnessed by my system, fifteen years before the basic inventions for wireless which I gave to the world in 1893 were applied universally.

Big up Samuel L. Jackson, because here's a guy who has broken down doors.

If anything, I was the definite edge of the spear into The Attitude Era, I believe, so it was way before its time, the stuff I was doing, and it kind of set the tone for what was to come.

There was a time Michael Jackson couldn't get his video on MTV because he was considered to be 'urban.' The Michael Jackson. So I literally have to be the Michael Jackson of apparel in order to break down the doors for everyone who will come after I'm gone, after I'm dead.

There's a tremendous amount of work building the apparatus, getting the experiment to work. But sitting there late at night in the lab, and knowing light is going at bicycle speed, and that nobody in the history of mankind has ever been here before - that is mind-boggling. It's worth everything.

Becoming baseball analyst was really important for me to not just be one of the first, but to literally break open the door and come in and stay, so that we could start inviting our friends and everyone, like, Come on. The door is open now. I am so proud of the fact that I put that pressure on myself: Alright, Jess, you've got a lot of women on your back right now and it's on you, so don't screw it up. I put that pressure on myself on purpose, so I'd realize it's not just about me, it's about a whole gender.

One indicator of Ernest Lawrence's influence is the fact that I am the eighth member of his laboratory staff to receive the highest award that can come to a scientist - the Nobel Prize.

A hundred years ago, when Richard Strauss, who has already been quoted and already been heard today, and other creative people, laid the foundation stone for the joint assertion of their rights and interests, they had pioneering work ahead of them in Germany.

No king or minister could have instructed Newton to discover the law of gravity, for they did not know and could not know that there was such a law to discover. No Treasury official told Fleming to discover penicillin. Nor was Rutherford instructed to split the atom by a certain date.

Sometimes I have compared myself with a scientist or something: when you discover something and you don't expect the whole world to understand it. I always thought I was doing that kind of activity, in art and in music too.

Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she'd retired the day after she recorded 'I Feel Love' in 1977.

There's a lot of rappers out there, a lot of gay girls expressing themselves; I'm not the first to say it; I'm not the first to rap about it. But I'm the one who broke down those doors that everybody has been trying to break down. I did that. I'm the one who went triple platinum first.

In all times it is only individuals that have advanced science, not the age.

Every student of science, even if he cannot start his journey where his predecessors left off, can at least travel their beaten track more quickly than they could while they were clearing the way: and so before his race is run, he comes to virgin forest and becomes himself a pioneer.

When something original works, then everyone wants to copy it. But if you're trying to do something that no one's ever seen before it's frightening.

For the greater a man's works for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight, and the rarer success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.

When you choose your fields of labor go where nobody else is willing to go.

Nikola Tesla spent one of his most productive years in Colorado Springs.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

I like to think I opened doors for other women, although that wasn't my original intention.

Everything was so new - the whole idea of going into space was new and daring. There were no textbooks, so we had to write them.

People often ask me why I persisted in doing research on a subject that was so controversial. I frequently respond by telling them that only a few scientists are granted the great fortune to pursue topics that are so new and different that only a small number of people can grasp the meaning of such discoveries initially.

There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.