There’s no scientist I know who wouldn’t rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it’s great fun!
Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.
You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you’re living through it.
We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.
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.
Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, ‘Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?’
A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.
The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.
In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.
The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.
It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!
I believe that each young person is different from any other who has ever lived, as different as his fingerprints: that he could bring to the world a wonderful and special way of solving unsolved problems, that in his special way, he can be great.
I don’t mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.
The present is the past biting into the future.
One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it.
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.
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.
Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn’t know they had.
The bottom line is in heaven!
A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.