Designers

"Creativity is not the domain of one single person. Through free-association of thoughts and brainstorming, an accidental suggestion can be the best solution."

"Choices, the greatest power we have, Choices, the path which is destiny, Choices, the result which is you... .'"

"To devise these living pictures with simple well-known flowers seems to me to be the best thing to do in gardening."

"The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies, but grows to the enduring happiness that the love of gardening gives."

"I am strongly of the opinion that possession of plants, however good, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection."

"The duty we owe to our gardens is to so use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes."

"Paint upon a palette, delighting our eyes with soul-satisfying pictures, a treasure of well set jewels a sympathy with growing things, fashioned into a dream of beauty, a place of perfect rest and refreshment of mind and body. This sense of beauty is a gift of God."

"Everybody loves you when you're dead. Everyone is suddenly your dearest friend. Nobody talks no dirt about you. But life, it just goes on above your head, when you're dead."

"You can give your confession tomorrow, if you find a priest dumb enough to believe, because it only hurts when I breathe."

"Late for work again today. Somebody was lying down on the job again. Will you people please stop jumping under my train? 'Ladies and gentlemen, there will be a slight delay while we hose the blood away.'"

"I'm a raging success as a failure."

"Another perfect catastrophe is just waiting to happen, watching for the moment to transpire. Another perfect catastrophe is just dying to go down. It's only looking for the perfect place and time."

"A thousand eyes are gazing down like bullet holes shot into the roof, as I lie here scratching for a grain of truth."

"I'm sipping on an oxygen cocktail with an ambulance chaser."

"People are very much victims of their lack of education. This of course makes them a lot easier to control. It works the same way there as it does (in America). I wouldn't say that surprised me."

"A record should be like a bus ticket to somewhere, but you're not sure where that somewhere is going to be. (It) shouldn't just give you thirteen variations on the same four elements, like McDonald's, or something. 'You liked that one? Well here's the same thing, except with extra cheese.'"

"Every word I never spoke dies like a spark smothered in smoke pulled from the glow of a shitty cigarette."

"I've been down so long that coming up is giving me the bends."

"I was in Brooklyn and it was freezing cold. I was living in a room with no windows and paying too much in rent. I envisioned sitting under a palm tree. I followed my nose from there."

"It's a bit like being a mad scientist. You mix a bit of this with some of that. You're never sure what's going to happen. But I'd rather blow up the laboratory than keep reinventing the wheel."

"Friday was the crucifixion Saturday, cremation under glass. The resurrection was on Sunday, no.. correction make it Monday; cause Monday's when they come to take the trash."

"If there is a designer whose name is synonymous with industrial design it is Raymond Loewy (1893-1986)."

"What Charles and Ray Eames are to furniture design, Raymond Loewy is to industrial design -- the modern master"

"I never expected that one could fall so completely in love with a nation and a people. I already knew that very soon I would thrill at everything American, love everything American, perhaps blindly, but fervently and forever. I still remember how thrilled I was at the sight of the flag. After all these years, every time I see the Stars and Stripes in the breeze, I get the same emotional feeling. Aesthetically speaking, it is perfect. One of the outstanding "designs" of all times. It may be that a nation gets the flag it deserves."

"This book is the story of a young man who came to America to make a living, and simply happened to do so in a profession which he helped to create."

"Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy."

"A lot of people are open to new things, as long as they look like the old ones."

"Is it responsible to camouflage one of America's most remarkable machines as a piece of gaudy merchandise? Form, which should be the clean- cut expression of mechanical excellence has become sensuous and organic."

"I believe one should design for the advantage of the largest mass of people, first and always. That takes care of ideologies and sociologies."

"Design is too important to be left to designers."

"Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals."

"The Unix room still exists, and it may be the greatest cultural reason for the success of Unix as a technology. More groups could profit from its lesson, but it's really hard to add a Unix-room-like space to an existing organization. You need the culture to encourage people not to hide in their offices, you need a way of using systems that makes a public machine a viable place to work - typically by storing the data somewhere other than the "desktop" - and you need people like Ken and Dennis (and Brian Kernighan and Doug McIlroy and Mike Lesk and Stu Feldman and Greg Chesson and ...) hanging out in the room, but if you can make it work, it's magical. When I first started at the Labs, I spent most of my time in the Unix room. The buzz was palpable; the education unparalleled."

"I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."

"The major things we saw wrong with Unix when we started talking about what would become Plan 9, back around 1985, all stemmed from the appearance of a network. As a stand-alone system, Unix was pretty good. But when you networked Unix machines together, you got a network of stand-alone systems instead of a seamless, integrated networked system. Instead of one big file system, one user community, one secure setup uniting your network of machines, you had a hodgepodge of workarounds to Unix's fundamental design decision that each machine is self-sufficient."

"One odd detail that I think was vital to how the group functioned was a result of the first Unix being run on a clunky minicomputer with terminals in the machine room. People working on the system congregated in the room - to use the computer, you pretty much had to be there. (This idea didn't seem odd back then; it was a natural evolution of the old hour-at-a-time way of booking machines like the IBM 7090.) The folks liked working that way, so when the machine was moved to a different room from the terminals, even when it was possible to connect from your private office, there was still a "Unix room" with a bunch of terminals where people would congregate, code, design, and just hang out. (The coffee machine was there too.)"

"Where will we be ten years from now? CRT’s will be a thing of the past, multimedia will no longer be a buzzword, pen-based and voice input will be everywhere, and university students will still be editing with emacs. Pens and touchscreens are too low-bandwidth for real interaction; voice will probably also turn out to be inadequate. (Anyway, who would want to work in an environment surrounded by people talking to their computers?) Mice are sure to be with us a while longer, so we should learn how to use them well."

"Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing."

"On a related topic, let me say that I'm not much of a fan of object-oriented design. I've seen some beautiful stuff done with OO, and I've even done some OO stuff myself, but it's just one way to approach a problem. For some problems, it's an ideal way; for others, it's not such a good fit. [...] OO is great for problems where an interface applies naturally to a wide range of types, not so good for managing polymorphism (the machinations to get collections into OO languages are astounding to watch and can be hellish to work with), and remarkably ill-suited for network computing. That's why I reserve the right to match the language to the problem, and even - often - to coordinate software written in several languages towards solving a single problem. It's that last point - different languages for different subproblems - that sometimes seems lost to the OO crowd."

"Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building."

"Software engineering is the part of computer science which is too difficult for the computer scientist."

"[Software engineering is the] establishment and use of sound engineering principles to obtain economically software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently."

"Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."

"This quixotic quality of Rockwell's movement, with equal measures of fantastic daring and pathological resentment, has enabled the racist Right to make a hero of him, something of a martyr (assassinated by one of his own followers, no less). But there is something about Rockwell's story— about his persistence in his beliefs and in his political activism—that seems heroic in a peculiar but genuine way, if only because one has to grant a man some measure of respect for sticking to his guns no matter what and for refusing to submit to the belief of the dominant mainstream that he was crazy because he adopted execrable political ideas (psychotherapy has sometimes become a form of Stalinism in democratic, technological countries). And there is something tragic about Rockwell, a man of no small intelligence, no small ambition, no small abilities, who could waste himself so thoroughly in something so grotesque and so mean-spirited."

"George Lincoln Rockwell is an egocentric and a chronic failure who created the shabby, small-time enterprise which he named the American Nazi Party in order to abate his tormenting ambitions to achieve fame. Carrying the war-tattered banner of a vanquished enemy the world would like to forget, Rockwell leads his heterogeneous "army" against an imaginary "Zionist conspiracy." Distasteful costumes, contemptible slogans, and disruptive tactics have brought national attention to Rockwell, inflating him and his group far beyond their due."

"We must appreciate the irony of Rockwell, an agnostic, using biblical allusions to promote Hitler, an anti-Semitic Odinist, as spiritual heir to Jesus of Nazareth, a radical Jewish rabbi."

"Friends of mine are always showing me articles. "Look at what this bigoted bastard wrote!" And then I dug something. Liberals will buy anything a bigot writes. And they'll really support it. George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, perhaps is a very knowledgeable businessman with no political convictions whatsoever. He gets three bucks a head and works the mass rallies of nothing but angry Jews, shaking their fists and wondering why there are so many Jews there. And he probably has two followers who are deaf. They think the swastika is an Aztec symbol."

"Without question Lincoln is the loudest talker on the campus, the originator of more weird theories than anyone else, and the Academy's outstanding artist. A memorable noise (whether or not it is pleasant is up to you) from Sturtevant Home is Lincoln Rockwell playing (?) sweet (?) music on the ivories of a nearby piano. He is the chief lover of classical music in the school; a champion rodent trainer, and an accomplished humorist. The two Rockwells started a new communication system here which, because of some arch-fiend, had only a brief existence. Rockwell is like his comedian father—always on hand with a joke or always ready with a kind word. He is headed for Harvard, they say, and we have every assurance of his being successful because of his incomparable personality and originality."

"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

"George Lincoln Rockwell's talent was that he knew what would make people hate him. [...] [He] had an inordinate capacity for finding out what would make people the angriest and exploiting it."

"LOVE, the natural, healthy kind, is indeed what makes the world go round, and is the most beautiful, holy miracle we ever see here on this earth. BUT WITHOUT A DEADLY HATE OF THAT WHICH THREATENS WHAT WE LOVE, LOVE IS AN EMPTY WORD, A CATCHWORD FOR HIPPIES, QUEERS, AND COWARDS."