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.

— Edwin Land

Edwin Land Quotes

My motto is very personal and may not fit anyone else or any other company. It is: Don’t do anything that someone else can do. Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

— Edwin Land

Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.

— Edwin Land

There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.

— Edwin Land

As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.

— Edwin Land

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals.

— Edwin Land

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

— Edwin Land

I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.

— Edwin Land

Look, if the picture you get instantly is as beautiful as the picture you get by waiting seven days, then it is absolute madness to say that there is virtue in waiting.

— Edwin Land

A premature attempt to explain something that thrills you will destroy your perceptivity rather than increase it, because your tendency will be to explain away rather than seek out.

— Edwin Land

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

— Edwin Land

You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.

— Edwin Land

I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.

— Edwin Land

The very essence of democracy is the absolute faith that while people must cooperate, the first function of democracy, its peculiar gift, is to develop each individual into everything that he might be.

— Edwin Land

In this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man’s intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.

— Edwin Land

If this is preparation for life, where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?

— Edwin Land

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

— Edwin Land

True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.

— Edwin Land

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don’t have to use it.

— Edwin Land

You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.

— Edwin Land

The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.

— Edwin Land
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