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.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will involve the patient in the proper use of food, fresh air and exercise.
There is far more danger in public than in private monopoly, for when Government goes into business it can always shift its losses to the taxpayers. Government never makes ends meet, and that is the first requisite of business.
The biggest failure of man is that he gives up before he realizes how close he was to success.
We are striking it big in the electric light, better than my vivid imagination first conceived. Where this thing is going to stop Lord only knows.
I would rather have one man with enthusiasm working with me than ten who are complacent.
Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.
There cannot be overproduction of anything which men and women want. And their wants are unlimited, except by the size of their stomachs.
I am much less interested in what is called God’s word than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made.
I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles.
Focus on how the end-user customers perceive the impact of your innovation – rather than on how you, the innovators, perceive it.
In ‘Common Sense’ Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again.
Everyone steals in commerce and industry. I’ve stolen a lot, myself. But I know how to steal! They don’t know how to steal!
When down in the mouth, remember Jonah. He came out all right.
Baseball is the greatest of American games. Some say football, but it is my firm belief, and it shall always be, that baseball has no superior.
I try not to invent things that people don’t need.
No, I haven’t failed thousands of times. On the contrary, I have successfully eliminated thousands of ideas that do not work!
Smoking too much makes me nervous. Must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits. Holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havana curl.
I never once failed at making a light bulb. I just found out 99 ways not to make one.
The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan’s principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.