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An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.

Edwin Land

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Edwin Land
Age: 81 †
Born: 1909
Born: May 7
Died: 1991
Died: March 1
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Photographer
Physicist
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Edwin Land
Edwin Herbert Land
E.H. Land
Rather
Invention
Business
Acceptance
Science
Quickly
Something
Accepted
Alteration
Already
Alterations
Turn
Trivial
Existence
Inventing
Turns
Existed

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I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.
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Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.
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Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
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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.
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Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.
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In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.
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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.
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Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.
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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.
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Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
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I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.
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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.
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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.
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Politeness is the poison of collaboration.
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Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.
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The world belongs to the articulate.
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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.
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[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.
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The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.
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Aladdin in his most intoxicated moments would never have dreamed of asking his [djinn] for [a polaroid] ... It's utterly new in concept and appearance, utilizing an utterly revolutionary flash system, an utterly revolutionary viewing system, utterly revolutionary electronics, and utterly revolutionary film structure.
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