Thomas A. Edison
Thomas A. Edison
Thomas Alva Edisonwas an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park", he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionInventor
Date of Birth11 February 1847
CountryUnited States of America
Thomas A. Edison quotes about
The stomach is the only part of man which can be fully satisfied. The yearning of man's brain for new knowledge and experience and for more pleasant and comfortable surroundings never can be completely met. It is an appetite which cannot be appeased.
Direct thought is not an attribute of feminity. In this, women are now centuries behind man.
There is no limit to which a man will not go to avoid thinking.
The world owes nothing to any man, but every man owes something to the world.
I am much less interested in what is called God's word than in God's deeds. All bibles are man-made.
Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.
The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change.
What a man's mind can create, man's character can control.
A reporter called on Edison to interview him about a substitute for lead in the manufacture of storage batteries that the scientist was seeking. Edison informed the man that he had made 20,000 experiments but none had worked. "Aren't you discouraged by all this waste of effort?" the reporter asked. Edison: "Waste! There's nothing wasted. I have discovered 20,000 things that won't work."
My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.
It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.
The biggest failure of man is that he gives up before he realizes how close he was to success.
Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.
I would rather have one man with enthusiasm working with me than ten who are complacent.