Quotes on design, technology, and humanity.
- We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.
- — Edward de Bono
- Traditional thinking is all about “what is.” Future thinking will also need to be about what can be.
- — Edward de Bono
- Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.
- — Walter Gropius
- “The past must be invented, the future must be revised. Doing both makes what the present is.”
- — John Cage
- “Music is continuous, it is we who turn away.”
- — old Indian saying
- “[HD video] is terrible. But it’s a fantastic terribleness.”
- — David Lynch
- “Consulting is where product companies go to die. IBM is the most famous example. So starting as a consulting company is like starting out in the grave and trying to work your way up into the world of the living.”
- — Paul Graham
- “Strategy is simply the recipe for why.”
- — me
- “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
- — Adlai Stevenson
- “There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.”
- — Freeman Dyson
- “If you can measure it, it’s not innovation.”
- — chad stoller, consulting hero
- “The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, I’m convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.”
- — Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- “Yet in leaving home I didn’t lose touch w/my origin because lo mexicano’s in my system. I’m a turtle; wherever I go I carry home on my back.”
- — Borderlands, La Frontera, by Gloria Anzaldua, Chicana-tejana-lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer.
- “Man mußden Menschen vor allem nach seinen Lastern beurteilen. Tugenden können vorgetäuscht sein. Laster sind echt.”
(”One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.”) - — Klaus Kinski
- “Everything affects everything else.”
- — richard saul wurman
- “But [LISP] macros are like having these high-powered band-aids, when what you want is not to be wounded in the first place.”
- — Steve Yegge
- Our internet connection bounces like [dj] godfather’s girlfriends.
- — jason pratt
- “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood or assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
- — Antoine de Saint Exupery
- “It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.”
- — RFC 1925
- “They should make a movie of the dances that i do while i wait for my code to compile.”
- — me
- If your [web] page is like a nice orderly cemetery, moving some of the headstones around or inflating them really can upset the balance of the space. But if your page is like a basketball court, things get out of balance if the elements don’t all respond to the movements, expansions, and contractions of their peers.
I’m not talking about gratuitous typographical animation, but about essential typographical adaptation to the constraints of the rendering environment and the needs of the user.
It’s about porting visual design intelligence into runtime, out of “design time.”
- – Todd Fahrner on design thinking
- “Think before you click before you design.”
- — Ian Anderson, the designers republic
- “A lot of my books I’ve intended for children primarily, but nobody would ever publish them as children’s books. I don’t know many children. And I don’t know if I really remember what it was like being a child… Children are pathetic and quite frequently not terribly likeable. I don’t really know any babies.
I’ve never known any babies.”
- — Edward Gorey.
- “Uh yeah, can you turn the sleep knob up to 7, turn the water knob up to 10 and push the food slider back down to 4 for
today, but tomorrow food will need to be back at 7 and sleep back down to 6. if you forget, everything will break so don’t forget okay?” - — elly.org
- “Some people do not understand that hacking is an art, a form of artistic expression. Each advisory I write is a statement about how the intricate mechanisms put in place to do nothing but make money are ultimately flawed.”
- — Simple Nomad
- “if i had known it was harmless, i would have killed it myself.”
- — the straight girl, regarding the mosquito hawk. ( a scanner darkly, philip k. dick)
- “Everything is surprisingly difficult.”
- — Lucy Suchman
- “sex times technology equals the future”
- — J.G. Ballard
- “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
- — Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953
- “XSL is a big step back, it mixes everything up again and puts everything in the hands of the few people who can understand this weird declaration thing which is simultaneously both past and future and in which nothing really ever ‘happens.’”
- — michael leventhal
- XSLT is what every programmer expected HTML would be, before actually using [HTML].
- — me
- “Although
implode()can, for historical reasons, accept its parameters in either order,explode()cannot.” - — the PHP manual
jm3theDestroyer: it’s always been a pet peeve of mine when people use the dirty fonts bone stock, with no post-processing.
Dcnstrctr: “dirty fonts bone stock”
jm3theDestroyer: that’s the pull quote, there.
Dcnstrctr: obviously.
Another classic intimidation with which to begin a letter is:
“According to our records…”
It reminds you at once, with that plural pronoun, that the enemy outnumbers you, and the reference to “records” makes it clear that they’ve got the goods. There is even a lofty pretense to fairness, as though you were being invited to bring forth your records to clear up this misunderstanding. You know, however, that they don’t suspect for an instant that there’s anything wrong in their records.
Besides, you don’t have any records, as they damn well know.
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