461 Quotes by Thomas A. Edison

I shall make electricity so cheap that only the rich can afford to burn candles

I have not failed. I have successfully discovered 1200 ideas that don't work.

Whatever the mind of man creates, should be controlled by man's character.

I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. I take half-matured schemes for mechanical development and make them practical. I am a sort of a middleman between the long-haired and impractical inventor and the hard-headed business man who measures all things in terms of dollars and cents. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.

It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer (banker), and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.

I am afraid of radium and polonium ... I don't want to monkey with them.

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.