Top 60 Edwin Land Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.”

— Edwin Land

2. “Politeness is the poison of collaboration.”

— Edwin Land

3. “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.”

— Edwin Land

4. “There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. It is: If anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.”

— Edwin Land

5. “Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.”

— Edwin Land

6. “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”

— Edwin Land

7. “A mistake is a future benefit, the full value of which is yet to be realized.”

— Edwin Land

8. “The world belongs to the articulate.”

— Edwin Land

9. “You must expect failure after failure after failure before you succeed.”

— Edwin Land

10. “Intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out resources in people that they didn’t know they had.”

— Edwin Land

11. “Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.”

— Edwin Land

12. “If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don’t think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5,000 steps.”

— Edwin Land

13. “This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals.”

— Edwin Land

14. “Work only on problems that are manifestly important and seem to be nearly impossible to solve. That way you will have a natural market for your product and no competition.”

— Edwin Land

15. “All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.”

— Edwin Land

16. “Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.”

— Edwin Land

17. “Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going.”

— Edwin Land

18. “Someone is going to make your product obsolete. Make sure it’s you.”

— Edwin Land

19. “The first thing you do is teach the person to feel that the vision is very important and nearly impossible. That draws out the drive in the winner.”

— Edwin Land

20. “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.”

— Edwin Land

21. “You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you’re living through it.”

— Edwin Land

22. “I submit to you that when in each man the dream of personal greatness dies, democracy loses the real source of its future strength.”

— Edwin Land

23. “It is a curious property of research activity that after the problem has been solved the solution seems obvious. This is true not only for those who have not previously been acquainted with the problem, but also for those who have worked over it for years.”

— Edwin Land

24. “The most important thing about power is to make sure you don’t have to use it.”

— Edwin Land

25. “The bottom line is in heaven!”

— Edwin Land

26. “The present is the past biting into the future.”

— Edwin Land

27. “There is no such thing as group originality, group creativity or group perspicacity.”

— Edwin Land

28. “The test of an invention is the power of an inventor to push it through in the face of staunch-not opposition, but indifference-in society.”

— Edwin Land

29. “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.”

— Edwin Land

30. “True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.”

— Edwin Land

31. “Any problem can be solved using the materials in the room.”

— Edwin Land

32. “An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.”

— Edwin Land

33. “I believe quite simply that the small company of the future will be as much a research organization as it is a manufacturing company.”

— Edwin Land

34. “The future may require not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea.”

— Edwin Land

35. “There’s no scientist I know who wouldn’t rather be a charlatan. And when circumstances allow you to be both, why it’s great fun!”

— Edwin Land

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36. “We took on things which people might think would take a year or two. They weren’t particularly hard. What was hard was believing they weren’t hard.”

— Edwin Land

37. “Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.”

— Edwin Land

38. “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.”

— Edwin Land

39. “The world is like a fertile field that’s waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.”

— Edwin Land

40. “Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.”

— Edwin Land

41. “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.”

— Edwin Land

42. “We took nothing from anybody. We gave a great deal to the world. The only thing keeping us alive is our brilliance. The only thing that keeps our brilliance alive is our patents.”

— Edwin Land

43. “I have long aspired to make our company a noble prototype of industry, penetrating in science, reliable in engineering, creative in aesthetics and wholesomely prosperous in economics.”

— Edwin Land

44. “If this is preparation for life, where in the world, where in the relationship with our colleagues, where in the industrial domain, where ever again, anywhere in life, is a person given this curious sequence of prepared talks and prepared questions, questions to which the answers are known?”

— Edwin Land

45. “Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.”

— Edwin Land

46. “As I review the nature of the creative drive in the inventive scientists that have been around me, as well as in myself, I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangible embodied in a product or process.”

— Edwin Land

47. “In a few wretched buildings, we created a whole new industry with international significance.”

— Edwin Land

48. “I don’t mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.”

— Edwin Land

49. “We can be dramatic, even theatrical; we can be persuasive; but the message we are telling must be true.”

— Edwin Land

50. “You think that the only thing that counts is the bottom line! What a presumptuous thing to say. The bottom line is in heaven.”

— Edwin Land