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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.
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
Company
Motto
Anyone
Nearly
Else
Project
Someone
Fit
Anything
Projects
May
Unless
Important
Personal
Manifestly
Impossible
Undertake
More quotes by Edwin Land
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
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
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.
Edwin Land
It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.
Edwin Land
A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.
Edwin Land
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.
Edwin Land
Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.
Edwin Land
I believe each incoming freshman [in college] must be started at once on his own research project if we are to preserve his secret dream of greatness and make it come true.
Edwin Land
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.
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
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
Politeness is the poison of collaboration.
Edwin Land
Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.
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
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
Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.
Edwin Land
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
Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.
Edwin Land
A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.
Edwin Land
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.
Edwin Land
