Modern psychology teaches that experience is not merely the best teacher, but the only possible teacher.. There is no war between theory and practice. The most valuable experience demands both, and the theory should supplement the practice and not precede it.

We work day after day, not to finish things; but to make the future better ... because we will spend the rest of our lives there.

I object to people running down the future. I am going to live all the rest of my life there.

Research is industrial prospecting. The oil prospectors use every scientific means to find new paying wells. Oil is found by each one of a number of methods. My own group of men are prospecting in a different field, using every possible scientific means. We believe there are still things left to be discovered. We have only stumbled upon a few barrels of physical laws from the great pool of knowledge. Some day we are going to hit a gusher.

Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

Obsolescence is a factor which says that the new thing I bring you is worth more than the unused value of the old thing.