We had a rule in Tibet that anyone proposing a new invention had to guarentee that it was beneficial, or at least harmless, for seven generations of humans before it could be adopted.
Necessity, mother of invention.
In the New Testament it is taught that willing and voluntary service to others is the highest duty and glory in human life. . . . The men of talent are constantly forced to serve the rest. They make the discoveries and inventions, order the battles, write the books, and produce the works of art. The benefit and enjoyment go to the whole. There are those who joyfully order their own lives so that they may serve the welfare of mankind.
Our ability to create has outreached our ability to use wisely the products of our invention.
Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Truth as old as the hills is bound up in the Latin proverb, "Necessity is the mother of invention."
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'; that it was the first government which made a criticism of administration as much a part of the polity as administration itself. This critical opposition is the consequence of cabinet government.
Bear in mind that the children of life are the children of joy; that the lower animals are only unhappy when made so by man; that man alone of all the creatures, has "found out many inventions", the chief of which appears to be the art of making himself miserable, and of seeing all Nature stained with that dark and hateful colour.
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
One of the greatest labor saving inventions of today is tomorrow.
The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.
The distance drew near, like a speck on a ball Where circular imprints stepped from the light And whispered a slogan invented by anyone. So they all went along and yelled to the heavens Or some place as good.
A man has invented a chair that can be adjusted to eight hundred different positions. It is designed for a boy to sit in when he goes to church.
Invention is the mother of necessity.
A tribute, published October 22, 1931, to Thomas Alva Edison upon his death: More than any other man, Mr. Edison lifted us out of the material surroundings of the Middle Ages. For most part, his inventions were spectacular in that they served to effect the emancipation of humanity and at the same time made possible mass production, greater factories, new and faster transportation methods, speedier distribution of commodities and a general increase in the happiness and higher standards of living for the peoples of the world. His inventions have provided employment directly for more than a million persons and many millions are employed because of their indirect benefits. It has been recorded that the investment value of all the undertakings rooted in his inventions equals the value of all the gold mined in the world since Columbus discovered America. Thomas A. Edison, whom we revered for his simplicity and his greatness, has passed on, but his name and his achievements remain to be magnified in the light of their untold benefits to future generations.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
The efforts of certain Christian factions to cast themselves as the inheritors of America's Judaeo-Christian tradition find little support in the embarrassing heterodoxy of this Founding Father: "But the greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion of his own country was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. . . . The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object. . . ."
I am wondering what would have happened to me if some fluent talker had converted me to the theory of the eight-hour day and convinced me that it was not fair to my fellow workers to put forth my best efforts in my work. I am glad that the eight-hour day had not been invented when I was a young man. If my life had been made up of eight-hour days, I do not believe I could have accomplished a great deal. This country would not amount to as much as it does if the young men of fifty years ago had been afraid that they might earn more than they were paid for.
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
The act of painting is not a duplication of experience but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention.
Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory. Nothing can be made of nothing; he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.
The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern men great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.
On the telephone: That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
