“So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“I have never failed, I've only shown the way I did it before doesn't work.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“I told [John Kruesi] I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb', etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
―
Thomas A. Edison
“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
―
Thomas A. Edison
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
