“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.”
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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.
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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.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold.”
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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”
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Thomas A. Edison
“I have never failed, I've only shown the way I did it before doesn't work.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic ... It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood ... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.”
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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.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.”
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Thomas A. Edison
“If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”
―
Thomas A. Edison
