Quote

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

Edwin Land

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Research
Anyone
Science
Else
Anything
Readily

More quotes by Edwin Land

Image
Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.
Edwin Land
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.
Edwin Land
Image
It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!
Edwin Land
Image
We can be dramatic, even theatrical we can be persuasive but the message we are telling must be true.
Edwin Land
Image
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.
Edwin Land
Image
[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.
Edwin Land
Image
A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
Edwin Land
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There's a rule they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School. It is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.
Edwin Land
Image
The world is like a fertile field that's waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.
Edwin Land
Image
Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.
Edwin Land
Image
Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
Edwin Land
Image
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.
Edwin Land
Image
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
Edwin Land
Image
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
Image
A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.
Edwin Land