A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
William Blake

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
Allen Tate

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
Edith Wharton

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.
Jimmy Carter

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
Steve Wozniak

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.
Thomas A. Edison

Before 1980, it was basically illegal for U.S. banks to invent new products.
Scott Cook

Before the work comes to you, you have to invent work.
Steve Lacy

Could I interrupt here, because there is an alternative explanation, which you are particularly well placed to examine. You know the argument that it is the alchemists in the laboratories who invent the sweet new kits.
E. P. Thompson

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
David Herbert Lawrence

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.
R. Buckminster Fuller

For more than 150 years free men in our countries have had the opportunities to educate themselves, choose their own religions, select their own occupations, accumulate capital and invent better ways of doing things.
Charles E. Wilson

From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
Katherine Whitehorn

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
J. G. Ballard

God forgives those who invent what they need.
Lillian Hellman

He spends his life explaining from his pulpit that the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is not true it has been found necessary to invent it.
Hector Hugh Munro

Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
Germaine Greer

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.
David R. Brower

I grew up in a family where our mother made our clothing. We didn't have a lot of money, so we learned how to scrimp, and we learned how to invent and to create. And those are learned skills.
Marcy Kaptur

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.
Philip Levine