Edwin Land quotes:

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.

Politeness is the poison of collaboration.

Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.

I say that our system of tests and grades, as it now exists, is one source of the low yield of great men from our universities. The marking system is a traumatic experience from which most students emerge with a deep determination never to get into a situation where they can be marked again. They just won't ever again take a chance.

The role of science is to be systematic, to be accurate, to be orderly, but it certainly is not to imply that the aggregated, successful hypotheses of the past have the kind of truth that goes into a number system.

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.

There's a rule they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. It is: If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess.

Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.

Who can object to a monopoly when any new company, if it is built around a scientific nucleus, can create a new monopoly of its own by creating a wholly new field?

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.

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it.

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

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.

Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it's you.

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.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

The process must be concealed from - non-existent for - the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in the taking and not in the making photographs... In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture.

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.

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

Any problem can be solved as long as it is stated properly.

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.

You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.

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

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...from this day forward until the day you are buried, do two things each day. First, master a difficult old insight, and second, add some new piece of knowledge to the world each day.

I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.

Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

In my opinion, neither organisms nor organizations evolve slowly and surely into something better, but drift until some small change occurs which has immediate and overwhelming significance. The special role of the human being is not to wait for these favorable accidents but deliberately to introduce the small change that will have great significance.

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.

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.

One of the best ways to keep a great secret is to shout it.

The present is the past biting into the future.

I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.

Photography is unlike any other art form. In the other arts there is always a continuous interplay between the artist and his art. He has the painting or sculpture before him. What we have tried to do is to provide a medium for "artistic expression" to anyone with only a reasonable amount of time. By giving him a camera system with which he need only control his selection of focus, composition and lighting, we free him to select the moment and to criticize immediately what he has done. We enable him to see what else he wants to do on the basis of what he has just learned.

You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.

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.

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.

There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.

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.

We took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren't particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren't hard.

Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.

The second great product of industry should be the rewarding life for every person

We have to keep in practice like musicians. Besides, there are still potentialities to be realized in color film. To us, it's just like bringing up a child. You don't stop after you've had it.

Do not do anything that anyone else can do readily.

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.

A significant inventionmust be startling, unexpected. It must come to a world that is not prepared for it.

If you are able to state a problem - any problem - and if it is important enough, then the problem can be solved,

I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.

The bottom line is in heaven!

Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn't know they had.

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.

A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.

A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.

The world belongs to the articulate.

Famous in our circles is the story of the visiting English banker who in 1948 upon seeing our model 95 camera commented, 'Very interesting, but why would one want a picture in a minute?'

There's a tremendous popular fallacy which holds that significant research can be carried out by trying things. Actually it is easy to show that in general no significant problem can be solved empirically, except for accidents so rare as to be statistically unimportant. One of my jests is to say that we work empirically -- we use bull's eye empiricism. We try everything, but we try the right thing first!

It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!

Don't do anything that someone else can do.

The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.

In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.

We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.

[A Polaroid camera] places before you a thing that is more of the thing than the thing was.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

If this is preparation for life, where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?

Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.

Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.

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.

It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious.

When Arthur Ashe plays tennis, his purpose each day is to play the game in a way he has never played it before. It may be a backhand he uses, one that he may never have used before in that circumstance. His play is a fresh integration of his world at the instant of action. A really great scientist has the whole past at his disposal. At any instant he is rebuilding the world, molecule by molecule, in his subconscious. That is what you want in an athlete or a scientist.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. Scientists made a great invention by calling their activities hypotheses and experiments. They made it permissible to fail repeatedly until in the end they got the results they wanted. In politics or government, if you made a hypothesis and it didn't work out, you had your head cut off.

There's no scientist I know who wouldn't rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it's great fun!

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.

We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.

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.

[The Polaroid camera is] a system that will be a partner in perception, enabling us to see the objects in the world around us more vividly than we can see them without it, a system to be an aid to memory and a tool for exploration.

As I visualize it, the business of the future will be a scientific, social and economic unit. It will be vigorously creative in pure science where its contributions will compare with those of the universities.

True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.