Vision without execution is just hallucination.

We searched the Edison Papers at Rutgers, published collections of his letters and diaries, and the documented interviews and speeches from his lifetime, and found no primary-source record of this line in any form — the sentiment Edison is genuinely tied to is the well-attested "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration," not this one. The phrasing itself, particularly the modern managerial use of "execution" and "hallucination," reads as late-20th/early-21st-century business language rather than Edison's documented lexicon. Our full-text review confirms the line circulates widely in recent business writing — it appears in "The Startup Game" by William H. Draper (2011), "The GuruBook" by Jonathan Løw (2018), and "Super Thinking" by Weinberg and McCann (2019), typically without any Edison attribution, and one 2018 title even lists it under multiple credits including a Japanese proverb. The Edison attribution surfaces in casual sources and appears in print as early as a 1999 Forbes citation, but that is decades after his death and supplies no primary document. While the broader idea has been floated under other names — including Soichiro Honda and a Japanese proverb — we could not pin the exact wording to a single, credibly documented earlier author who would meet our bar for naming a competing origin, so this remains a case of failing to confirm Edison rather than proving someone else. Since the standard for misattribution requires positive evidence of a specific alternative source, which we do not have for this precise wording, the honest reading is that the line is commonly credited to Edison but unsupported by any primary evidence. We are marking this quotation as attributed.