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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.

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
Learned
Characteristics
Come
Definition
Must
Unexpected
Much
Definitions
Every
Several
Years
Invention
Would
Significant
World
Prepared
Startling

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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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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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I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.
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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.
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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.
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A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.
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Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
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Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
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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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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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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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Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.
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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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Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.
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The world belongs to the articulate.
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