The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.
One fails forward toward success.
It is man’s destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence and, as a byproduct of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth.
Don’t bring anything to me but trouble.
The price of progress is trouble.
When I was research head of General Motors and wanted a problem solved, I’d place a table outside the meeting room with a sign: “Leave slide rules here.” If I didn’t do that, I’d find someone reaching for his slide rule. Then he’d be on his feet saying, “Boss, you can’t do it.”
I think that the greatest education in the world is the education which helps one to be able to do the right things at the time it has to be done.
We are just in the kindergarten of uncovering things; there is no downcurve in science.
Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.
You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them.
One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don’t get as much government as we pay for.
A problem thoroughly understood is always fairly simple. Found your opinions on facts, not prejudices. We know too many things that are not true.
The whole fun of living is trying to make something better.
Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it takes years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.
And there is the point exactly, we are all the time blaming difficulties on to something else. Our real trouble is that we are too soft to solve the problem.
If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time...
Logic is a system whereby one may go wrong with confidence.
I could do nothing without my problems; they toughen my mind. In fact, I tell my assistants not to bring me their successes for they weaken me, but rather to bring me their problems, for they strengthen me.
There has never been any 30-hour week for men who had anything to do.