Quotes

Design is not the fabric of the sofa

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

Dueling Cream Pies

Road Tales, Rider Magazine April 2010

I'd vote to allow dueling to be legalized; after all, the challenged person can choose the weapons, and I'd go for cream pies at 15 feet.

Undiscovered strength

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.

Pay for your news

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 5 May 2010

I do not believe that Newsweek is the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but we're one of them. I don't think there are that many on the edge of that cliff.

We have to decide: are we ready to get what we pay for? If you're not going to pay for news, then you're going to get a different kind of news. Full stop.

The resilience of American democracy

Democracy in America (1835—1840)

The great privilege of the Americans does not consist in being more enlightened than other nations, but in being able to repair the faults they may commit.

The multitudes who enslave themselves

Ken Burns's America: The Statue of Liberty

No one was ever born who agreed to be a slave, who accepted it, that is slavery is a condition imposed from without. The moment I said that I realized that multitudes and multitudes of people, for various reasons of their own, enslave themselves every hour of every day to this or that doctrine, this or that delusion of safety, this or that lie. Anti-Semites, for example, are slaves to a delusion. People who hate Negros are slaves; people who love money are slaves. We live in a universe, really, of willing slaves which is what makes concepts of liberty so dangerous and concepts of freedom so dangerous.

Crayolas or self-help books?

http://twitter.com/berkun/status/11000644702 (liberties taken during detwitterization)

Many adults haven't made anything in years—giving them legos or crayons would help more than reading books on creativity.

On Being a Defense Attorney

Closing Argument, The State of Illinois v Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb

A great many people in this world believe the end justifies the means. I don't know but that I do myself. And that is the reason I never want to take the side of the prosecution, because I might harm an individual. I am sure the state will live anyhow.

Bad Apples in Washington DC

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.

Inspiration and work

Creativity, 1996

Everyone agrees that necessary as it is to listen to the unconscious, it is not sufficient. The real work begins when the emotion or idea that sprang from the uncharted regions of the psyche is held up to the light of reason, there to be named, classified, puzzled over, and related to other emotions and ideas. It is here that craft comes into play: The writer draws on a huge repertoire of words, expressions, and images used by previous writers, selects the ones most fitting to the present task, and knows how to make up new ones when needed.

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