Daily Archives: July 23, 2017

“I welcome and seek your ideas, but do not bring me small ideas; bring me big ideas to match our future.” 

“Don’t bother people for help without first trying to solve the problem yourself.”

“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” 

“I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” 

“I have a private life in which I do not permit interference. It must be respected.” 

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” 

“My powers are ordinary. Only my application brings me success.” 

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” 

“I felt that chess… is a science in the form of a game… I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.” 

“Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.” 

“I can see there’s a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn’t have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.” 

“My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.” 

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” 

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” 

“The leftist is anti-individualistic … He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs.”

“I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.” 

“I like villains because there’s something so attractive about a committed person – they have a plan, an ideology, no matter how twisted.” – They’re motivated.

“I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.” 

“The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.” 

“It’s an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That’s always been a tug of war for me.” 

“I like analyzing human behavior. It’s complex. That’s what keeps me going.” 

“I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.” 

“I’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people. I’ve always wanted to stay true to myself, and I’ve managed to do that. People have to accept that.” 

“Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.” 

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.”

“I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.” 

“I’m the type of person who would rather stay home than get my picture taken.” 

“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” 

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” 

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” 

“Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from.” 

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” 

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 

“The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden.”

“People accuse me of being arrogant all the time. I’m not arrogant, I’m focused.” 

“The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.” 

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” 

“I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.” 

“People should pursue what they’re passionate about. That will make them happier than pretty much anything else.” 

“I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” 

“There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.” 

“Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.” 

“My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.” 

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.” 

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” 

“I’ve always been a big fan of science fiction and of the worlds of the spiritual and the mystic.” 

“I get anxious about a lot of things, that’s the trouble. I get anxious about everything. I just can’t stop thinking about things all the time. And here’s the really destructive part – it’s always retrospective. I waste time thinking of what I should have said or done.” 

“I never was someone who was at ease with happiness.” 

“For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.” 

“I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.” 

“If I’m enjoying something, I’d like to be able to just have it all. Frankly, that’s the way I’m approaching my career now. I’m a total workaholic.” 

“The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.” 

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” 

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” 

“I don’t create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.” 

“Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.” 

“I love to engage in repartee with people who are stupider than I am.” 

“A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.”

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” 

“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.” 

“If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”

“History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.” 

“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.” 

“I’ll tell you what makes me feel worthwhile: organizing and solving other people’s problems. It makes me feel good to go to Mexico City and figure out theories on how you can reorganize and reduce crime. To me, it’s one of the more fulfilling ways to spend a day.” 

“Leaders need to be optimists. Their vision is beyond the present.”

“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.” 

“I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem – and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?” 

“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” 

“If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if you – the probable outcome is failure.” 

“If I were to say, ‘God, why me?’ about the bad things, then I should have said, ‘God, why me?’ about the good things that happened in my life.” 

“If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.” 

“Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.”

“Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.” 

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” 

“High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.” 

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” 

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“At every crisis in one’s life, it is absolute salvation to have some sympathetic friend to whom you can think aloud without restraint or misgiving.” 

“I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damned business.” 

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

“The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.” 

“Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.”

“The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.” 

“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.” 

“If things are not so good, you may be one to imagine something better. For me, I was able to imagine myself as in a role of greater importance than I would seem to be ordinarily.” 

“I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.” 

“When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler.” 

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” 

“I’m destined to be attracted to those I cannot defeat.” 

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” 

“I tend to shut myself off from people. It’s gotten harder and harder for me to meet new people. It takes a lot of effort to open up to them and spend time with them.” 

“In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization.” 

“I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.”

“Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.” 

“Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.”