Edwin Land Quotes

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

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

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

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

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.

[The Polaroid camera is] a system that will be a partner in perception, enabling us to see the objects in the world around us more vividly than we can see them without it, a system to be an aid to memory and a tool for exploration.

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

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.

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.

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

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.

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

Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.

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

Politeness is the poison of collaboration.

You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.

There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.

There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.

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

An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.

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.

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

The bottom line is in heaven!

Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn't know they had.

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!

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.

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious. This is true not only for those who have not previously been acquainted with the problem, but also for those who have worked over it for years.

...from this day forward until the day you are buried, do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight, and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day.

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.

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.

The world belongs to the articulate.

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.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

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

The present is the past biting into the future.

Don't do anything that someone else can do.

If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved.

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

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

We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.