Thomas Edison — "I have more respect for the man who is trying to get somewhere than for the man …"
I have more respect for the man who is trying to get somewhere than for the man who has gotten somewhere and is resting on his laurels.
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More from Thomas Edison
"I am not a spiritualist, but I am a firm believer in the fact that we can communicate with the beyond."
"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
"We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Edison values the person who is still striving, still pushing toward a goal, over the person who has already succeeded and stopped working. Effort and forward motion matter more than past accomplishments. A climber mid-journey deserves more admiration than someone who reached a peak years ago and now coasts on that old win. The measure of a person is what they are doing now, not what they once did.
Relevance to Thomas Edison
Edison embodied this ethic. After inventing the phonograph and practical incandescent lamp, he didn't retire on fame; he kept filing patents until his death, ending with 1,093. His Menlo Park and West Orange labs ran on relentless iteration, famously testing thousands of filament materials. He worked 18-hour days into his 80s, chasing rubber substitutes and storage batteries long after he could have rested on light-bulb royalties.
The era
Edison's era, the Gilded Age into the early 20th century, celebrated the self-made industrialist and the myth of ceaseless productivity. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford built empires through relentless work, and American culture tied moral worth to industry. Meanwhile, inherited wealth and European-style leisure were viewed with suspicion. Against this backdrop, Edison's jab at 'resting on laurels' echoed a wider national creed that striving itself, not arrival, defined the worthy citizen.
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