Thomas A. Edison Quotes

When I was young I had an apprenticeship as an engineer.

We need to tell better stories of men and women who master a trade. We have to stop telling kids to blindly follow their passion and show them the opportunities that exist. That was the big, overarching message of 'Dirty Jobs.'

The Discovery was the most intricate, complex machine man has ever built. It's a testament to our time.

The idea of engineering is an idea of mastery. And today the role that we are being asked to play is a role based on informed humanity.

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

If I were 21 years old, I would go into biotechnology or genetic engineering.

For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.

No one expected a first year engineering student to build the perfect bridge.

I thought, I can't do advertising any more, so I was downloading all these PDF applications from community colleges. And I thought, I'll become a paramedic. I'll get a two-year associate degree, if I can get in.

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.

I always say prepare to be a coach to anybody who wants to be a coach. At 24 years of age when I left engineering to become full time in football, I made sure that I was never going back to engineering.

I didn't finish high school, but I went to a special school for producers and musicians, a three year course for engineering, producing and learning all the tricks. So now I have my producing degree and certification.

If we taught music the way we try to teach engineering, in an unbroken four year course, we could end up with all theory and no music. When we study music, we start to practice from the beginning, and we practice for the entire time.

I think a trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. I think the stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning.

The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that used to take generations. Preventing people from getting things like golden rice or disease-resistant cassava destroys human life, and does not spare the environment in any way.

Hire inexperience. This year we plan to hire 200 engineers - half of whom are recent grads. Young people are not burdened by years of experience. They haven't learned - or been told - what is right or wrong. With engineering, there is no tried and tested path. You try, and fail, and fix, and fail again.

The trade schools closed, so young Black men don't know how to build a house, or put a roof on a house or build cabinets anymore. We used to go to school to learn how to make ourselves useful in the trades. Then a man by the name of Samuel Gompers, a Jewish fellow, brought tradespeople from Eastern Europe, unions started and kept us out. We're having a problem on the national level, on the state level and on the local level because it's telling us that the White man doesn't want you anymore. You have no place in his house anymore except to be a little flunky around the door.

The simplest things in music are the ones that count. The simplest thing are, of course, also the most difficult to achieve and take years of work.

The Bank and the media continue to propagate the story that the global elite wishes to be told: that the number of poor has declined by 24 percent in those 15 years [1990-2005].

Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. ... Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

I have somewhat lost my enthusiasm in the last years. Mainly because film students using digital video these days have not really produced anything which is more than superficial or simplistic; so I have my doubts.

For almost ninety years I’ve walked among my kind, and yours… all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren’t alive yet.

By early 1943, the Pentagon was complete-a building big enough to house forty thousand people and all their accoutrements, the largest building in the world, conceived, funded, designed and constructed in a little more than a year. And on the day it was finished, it was already too small.

I've always wanted to work with Cameron Crowe. I've auditioned for him several times for various projects over the last ten years, and I've always admired the way he worked with me.