Top 200 Thomas A. Edison Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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. Interest is the invention of Satan.”

— Thomas A. Edison

202. “In creating technology for ourselves we created it for the world.”

— Thomas A. Edison

203. “The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell. Satan’s principal agent Dyspepsia must have charge of this branch of the vegetable kingdom.”

— Thomas A. Edison

204. “To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother’s keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .”

— Thomas A. Edison

205. “Two per cent. is genius, and ninety-eight per cent. is hard work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

206. “Any large extension of the Government into business affairs – no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled – will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.”

— Thomas A. Edison

207. “Smoking too much makes me nervous. Must lasso my natural tendency to acquire such habits. Holding heavy cigar constantly in my mouth has deformed my upper lip, it has a sort of Havana curl.”

— Thomas A. Edison

208. “The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.”

— Thomas A. Edison

209. “Incurably religious, that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people.”

— Thomas A. Edison

210. “Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.”

— Thomas A. Edison

Featured in: Book Quotes

211. “Nobody knows whether our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere, but if we can evolve an instrument so delicate to be manipulated by our personality as it survives in the next life such an instrument ought to record something...”

— Thomas A. Edison

212. “I start where the last man left off. What the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve.”

— Thomas A. Edison

213. “Most of the exercise I get is from standing and walking around laboratory tables all day. I derive more benefit and entertainment from this than some of my friends and competitors get from playing games like golf.”

— Thomas A. Edison

214. “Baseball is the greatest of American games. Some say football, but it is my firm belief, and it shall always be, that baseball has no superior.”

— Thomas A. Edison

215. “I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. It’s their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me. I am quite correctly described as ’more of a sponge than an inventor.”

— Thomas A. Edison

216. “Religion is all bunk.”

— Thomas A. Edison

217. “In ‘Common Sense’ Paine flared forth with a document so powerful that the Revolution became inevitable. Washington recognized the difference, and in his calm way said that matters never could be the same again.”

— Thomas A. Edison

218. “Inspiration can be found in a pile of junk. Sometimes, you can put it together with a good imagination and invent something.”

— Thomas A. Edison

219. “Be brave as your fathers before you. Have faith and go forward.”

— Thomas A. Edison

220. “My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.”

— Thomas A. Edison

221. “Friendship is the heaven of life.”

— Thomas A. Edison

222. “It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it!”

— Thomas A. Edison

Featured in: Book Quotes

223. “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.”

— Thomas A. Edison

224. “The dove is my emblem.”

— Thomas A. Edison

225. “Youth doesn’t take advice.”

— Thomas A. Edison

226. “I was at the foot of my class.”

— Thomas A. Edison

227. “As Danand Ian over at the Lifestyle Business Podcast say: Rush to failure.”

— Thomas A. Edison

228. “All bibles are man-made.”

— Thomas A. Edison

229. “I am much less interested in what is called God’s word than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made.”

— Thomas A. Edison

230. “The entity that gives life and motion to the human body is finer still and lies infinitely beyond the reach of our finest scientific instruments. When this entity deserts the body, the body is like a ship without a rudder – deserted, motionless, dead.”

— Thomas A. Edison

231. “An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.”

— Thomas A. Edison

232. “I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living – our dread of coming to an end.”

— Thomas A. Edison

233. “No Such Thing as Bad Results.”

— Thomas A. Edison

234. “I never knew I had an inventive talent until Phrenology told me so. I was a stranger to myself until then!”

— Thomas A. Edison

235. “I love great music and art, but I think ‘cubist’ songs and paintings are hideous.”

— Thomas A. Edison

236. “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

237. “Nature is truly wonderful. Only man is truly foul.”

— Thomas A. Edison

238. “Surprises and reverses can serve as an incentive for great accomplishment. There are no rules here, we’re just trying to accomplish something.”

— Thomas A. Edison

239. “I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.”

— Thomas A. Edison

240. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 foundations and individual donors whose priorities don’t align with my organization’s.”

— Thomas A. Edison

241. “They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has, but I notice he usually blunders forward.”

— Thomas A. Edison

242. “I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems.”

— Thomas A. Edison

243. “Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man’s character.”

— Thomas A. Edison

244. “I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles.”

— Thomas A. Edison