Today, people idolize athletes and celebrities - and yes, highly successful and visionary business people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but not the innovators who perhaps have not seen such high-flying levels of success. Can anyone name the inventors of GPS, which has such a huge impact on our lives today?

Naveen Jain

America is a country of inventors, and the greatest of inventors are the newspaper men.

Alexander Graham Bell

The painter, sculptor, writer, and musician are protected by law. So are inventors. But the chef has absolutely no redress for plagiarism on his work; on the contrary, the more the latter is liked and appreciated, the more will people clamour for his recipes.

Auguste Escoffier

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

Bertrand Piccard

Throughout human history, some of our most influential inventors, entrepreneurs, and leaders have had disabilities. For example, Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, and Charles Schwab are all dyslexic, while scientist Stephen Hawking has used a wheelchair for decades.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

For me, I always admire anyone that's entrepreneurs or inventors.

Charles Michael Davis

America is full of entrepreneurs, inventors, and dreamers.

Dan Lipinski

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

Daniel Kahneman

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

Dennis Ritchie

Bitcoin is absolutely the Wild West of finance, and thank goodness. It represents a whole legion of adventurers and entrepreneurs, of risk takers, inventors, and problem solvers. It is the frontier. Huge amounts of wealth will be created and destroyed as this new landscape is mapped out.

Erik Voorhees

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors.

Frank Rich

The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.

Freeman Dyson

The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.

Harry Seidler

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.

Jason Calacanis

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers.

John Sladek

The myth is that IP rights are as important as our rights in castles, cars, and corn oil. IP is supposedly intended to encourage inventors and the investment needed to bring their products to the clinic and marketplace.

John Sulston

I'm here to fight for the re-education of what celebrity is: to say, 'Yes, we are celebrities, but yes, we're also innovators. We're also inventors. We're also thoughtful.'

Kanye West

I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The word inventors have to create a new term to describe how I felt when I learned that 'Refund' was on the shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Story prize - Excited, thrilled, honored, none of them quite do it.

Karen Bender

There are conventions for people with serious, boring inventions, but fad inventors need help. You need someone to talk to. You just can't tell your friends you're going to invent a pet rock and mortgage your house to pay for it. It's embarrassing... risky mentally. Your friends think you're crazy.

Ken Hakuta

Something that I've cared about deeply my whole career is getting to work with filmmakers and inventors of stories that are hysterical because they are just so painfully true.

Laura Dern