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It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious. This is true not only for those who have not previously been acquainted with the problem, but also for those who have worked over it for years.

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
Science
Solution
True
Curious
Also
Solutions
Seems
Obvious
Problem
Property
Years
Worked
Acquainted
Research
Previously
Activity
Solved

More quotes by Edwin Land

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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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[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.
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We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.
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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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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
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The bottom line is in heaven!
Edwin Land
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Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.
Edwin Land
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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
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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.
Edwin Land
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Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
Edwin Land
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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.
Edwin Land
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Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.
Edwin Land
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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
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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
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A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
Edwin Land
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Don't do anything that someone else can do.
Edwin Land
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Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.
Edwin Land
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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
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The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.
Edwin Land
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Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.
Edwin Land