Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.
~ Alexander Graham Bell

Today every invention is received with a cry of triumph which soon turns into a cry of fear.
~ Bertolt Brecht

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.
~ James E. Burke

This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.
~ Lord Byron

The real use of gunpowder is to make all men tall.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Everything that can be invented has been invented.
~ Charles H. Duell

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
~ Thomas A. Edison

I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
~ Thomas A. Edison

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt.
~ Henry George

If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.
~ George Gobel

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
~ Albert Gyorgyi

That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best --make it all up --but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
~ Ernest Hemingway

The guns and bombs, the rockets and the warships, all are symbols of human failure.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson

We can invent only with memory.
~ Alphonse Karr

An inventor is simply a person who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.
~ Charles F. Kettering

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- gunpowder and romantic love.
~ Andre Maurois

I don't mind occasionally having to reinvent a wheel; I don't even mind using someone's reinvented wheel occasionally. But it helps a lot if it is symmetric, contains no fewer than ten sides, and has the axle centered. I do tire of trapezoidal wheels with offset axles.
~ Joseph Newcomer

A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.
~ Francis Picabia