35 quotes
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.
There are areas where untrained people may work effectively and with limited equipment. Our pupil doesn't need a big laboratory to do this, he needs freedom; he needs encouragement.
Generation of Greatness (1957)
Most large industrial concerns are limited by policy to special directions of expansion within the well-established field of the company.
Congressional testimony (1945)
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.
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.
The search for that language, the search for the ways to tell young people what we know as we grow older — the permanent and wonderful things about life — will be one of the great functions of this system.
The view I am presenting proposes a mechanism more and more interlocked with the totality of the exterior. This mechanism has no separate existence at all, being in a thousand ways united with and continuously interacting with the whole exterior domain.
I believe it is pretty well established now that neither the intuition of the sales manager nor even the first reaction of the public is a reliable measure of the value of a product to the consumer.
Research by the Business Itself (1945)
We have not found anti-intellectualism a problem at the Polaroid Corporation, except in the very initial state of penetration. It only takes a day to change someone from an anti-intellectual to an intellectual by persuading him that he might be one!
I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company, and that this new company is the frontier for the next generation.
Research by the Business Itself (1945)
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.
Generation of Greatness (1957)
I would urge that just as democracy initially meant the right of man to defend himself, to have a sword, and then meant the right to write, and then meant the right to read — so, now, democracy means the right to have the scientific experience.
Generation of Greatness (1957)
The scientist comes to the world and says, "I do not understand the divine source, but I know, in a way that I don't understand, that out of chaos I can make order, out of loneliness I can make friendship, out of ugliness I can make beauty."
Generation of Greatness (1957)
A contemporary man who has not participated intimately in actual work in science is, in my opinion, not a modern man. I believe that this experience in science should come early in the life of all of our pupils.
Generation of Greatness (1957)
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.
Generation of Greatness (1957)