Fragments of Clarity

“When they call you crazy,” said Bezos, “you know you have a good idea.”

“Right” said Dean. “If they say, ‘Hmmm, good idea,’ it’s probably too ordinary.”

–Conversation between Dean Kamen and Jeff Bezos as documented by Steve Kemper in Reinventing the Wheel

“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”

–Tom Peters

“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

 –Henry Ford

“I may have written sendmail to solve a local problem at Berkeley, but I continued working on it because I saw that e-mail was going to change the world - or rather, continue to change it - and I felt that change was going to be fundamentally positive, and that sendmail was a big part of that change.”

–Eric Allman

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats. ”

–Howard Aiken

“To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

–Thomas Edison

“…When everyone says you’re out of your mind, you just might be on to something.”

–Jeff Arch, screenwriter for Sleepless in Seattle

“Just as there can be no corn-stalks without straw, so there can be no dreams without nonsense.”

–Talmud, Berakhot