Designers

"Marcus Garvey believed that blacks should return to Africa and build up and accept Africa as their home. And he led a movement, here, in the United States, and he got caught up in a lot of scandal, and, eventually, it collapsed, and that was that...I read everything I could about Marcus Garvey, and my father was such an ardent Garveyite that he would talk about him all the time."

"Marcus Garvey...roused the consciousness of the Negro from New York to British Guiana and from the Gold Coast (Ghana) to Kenya. Without ever setting foot in Africa he was able to kindle nationalism in the hearts of the young Kenyatta, Azikiwe and Nkrumah, giving them a purpose for dedicating their lives to their country."

"In the early 1950s-the Garvey movement-I went to Harlem and saw Black Ethiopia. These were my people and they didn't have accents, but they were Ethiopians. I mean, they didn't have African accents. Those that I listened to spoke just like everybody else and that broadened my light a great deal, my own understanding of our oneness... it must be remembered that in Garvey's heyday, there were not that many West Indians anywhere in the United States. His existence was used as a focal point for the West Indian community and they were able to stay together, but the Black American, without his charisma and his presence, went on into other things. But the tales of the Black American who didn't want to be connected with Africa can be recounted as the West Indians who didn't want to be connected either, who would say, 'I'm a British citizen'... The self loathing which is always part of oppression had its way with all of us."

"Marcus ... maintained forcibly that although the Afro-American people were legally "free" as a people, something of the slave mentality was still characteristic of them. Mentally they were still in chains on account of the crippling effect of an inferiority complex. Somehow the sunlight must be allowed to flood the dark corners of their minds, so that they could be truly free and truly men, confident of holding their own with men of other races."

"In the course of his conversation Marcus Garvey said that ninety thousand of the people on the island of Jamaica were colored, and only fifteen thousand of them were white; yet the fifteen thousand white people possessed all the land, ruled the island, and kept the Negroes in subjection. I asked him what those ninety thousand Negroes were thinking about to be dominated in this way, and he said it was because they had no educational facilities outside of grammar-school work. He wanted to return to his native home to see if he could not help to change the situation there. Instead he went to New York, began to hold street meetings, and got many of his fellow countrymen as well as American Negroes interested in his program of worldwide Negro unity. For a time it seemed as if his program would go through. Undoubtedly Mr. Garvey made an impression on this country as no Negro before him had ever done. He has been able to solidify the masses of our people and endow them with racial consciousness and racial solidarity. Had Garvey had the support which his wonderful movement deserved, had he not become drunk with power too soon, there is no telling what the result would have been. Already the countries of the world were beginning to worry very much about the influence of his propaganda in Africa, in the West Indies, and in the United States. His month-long conference in New York City every August, bringing the dusky sons and daughters of Ham from all corners of the earth, attracted a great deal of attention... It may be that even though he has been banished to Jamaica the seed planted here will yet spring up and bring forth fruit which will mean the deliverance of the black race-that cause which was so dear to his heart."

"(What direction do you see the movement in the U.S. taking at this time?) I think it has become less domestic and more international. Marcus Garvey tried to articulate, after all, quite a long time ago, and even Frederick Douglass, that the situation of the black American slave was tied to the situation of the slaves all over the world."

"When the war started in Abyssinia all Negro nationalists looked with hope to Haile Selassie. They spoke for him, they prayed for him, they sung for him, they did everything to hold up his hands, as Aaron did for Moses; but whilst the Negro peoples of the world were praying for the success of Abyssinia this little Emperor was undermining the fabric of his own kingdom by playing the fool with white men, having them advising him[,] having them telling him what to do, how to surrender, how to call off the successful thrusts of his [Race] against the Italian invaders. Yes, they were telling him how to prepare his flight, and like an imbecilic child he followed every advice and then ultimately ran away from his country to England, leaving his people to be massacred by the Italians, and leaving the serious white world to laugh at every Negro and repeat the charge and snare - "he is incompetent," "we told you so." Indeed Haile Selassie has proved the incompetence of the Negro for political authority, but thank God there are Negroes who realise that Haile Selassie did not represent the truest qualities of the Negro race. How could he, when he wanted to play white? How could he, when he surrounded himself with white influence? How could he, when in a modern world, and in a progressive civilization, he preferred a slave State of black men than a free democratic country where the black citizens could rise to the same opportunities as white citizens in their democracies?"

"I read "Up From Slavery," by Booker T. Washington, and then my doom--if I may so call it--of being a race leader dawned upon me in London after I had traveled through almost half of Europe."

"When the facts of history are written Haile Selassie of Abyssinia will go down as a great coward who ran away from his country to save his skin and left the millions of his countrymen to struggle through a terrible war that he brought upon them because of his political ignorance and his racial disloyalty."

"I asked, "Where is the black man's Government?" "Where is his King and his kingdom?" "Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?" I could not find them, and then I declared, "I will help to make them.""

"If you have no confidence in self you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence you have won even before you have started."

"A Race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without roots."

"For the Negroes in America, the death of Malcolm X is the most portentous event since the deportation of Marcus Garvey in the 1920s."

"The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities' League is a social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive, and expansive society and is founded by persons, desiring to the utmost, to work for the general up lift of the Negro peoples of the world. And the members pledge themselves to do all in their power to conserve the rights of their noble race and to respect the rights of all mankind believing always in the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God. The motto of the organization is: One God! One Aim! One Destiny! Therefore, let justice be done to all man kind, realizing that if the strong oppresses the weak confusion and discontent will ever mark the path of man, but with love, faith and charity toward all the reign of peace and plenty will be heralded into the world and the generations of men shall be called Blessed."

"Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God's grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life."

"Our union must know no clime, boundary, or nationality… let us hold together under all climes and in every country…"

"Hungry men have no respect for law, authority or human life."

"We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism."

"We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind, because man is related to man under all circumstances for good or for ill."

"My father, the Reverend Earl Little, was a Baptist minister, a dedicated organizer for Marcus Aurelius Garvey’s U.N.I.A. (Universal Negro Improvement Association). With the help of such disciples as my father, Garvey, from his headquarters in New York City’s Harlem, was raising the banner of black-race purity and exhorting the Negro masses to return to their ancestral African homeland—a cause which had made Garvey the most controversial black man on earth."

"You need the willingness to fail all the time. You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work ."

"Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language.""

"Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs."

"Well, that's a subject interested me a lot because I've seen so many young people in our culture today, that emphasizes the success all the time and is always pointing to this success of researchers and developing some wonderful new thing. This pressure to succeed I found has caused many young students who I thought would make a very good researcher start doing research and then finding it they failed again and again and again and became discouraged very rapidly because the media makes it, creates the impression they should succeed right away. So they leave research and I think it's a great shame that young people have to understand research is 90% failure. It's very painful to the ego to fail again and again and again. I know I've done an awful a lot of failing in my career and I think that young students should recognize that what's research is about and if they can't stand failing then don't try to do the research. But it can be borne."

"For twenty years programming languages have been steadily progressing toward their present condition of obesity; as a result, the study and invention of programming languages has lost much of its excitement. Instead, it is now the province of those who prefer to work with thick compendia of details rather than wrestle with new ideas. Discussions about programming languages often resemble medieval debates about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin instead of exciting contests between fundamentally differing concepts. Many creative computer scientists have retreated from inventing languages to inventing tools for describing them. Unfortunately, they have been largely content to apply their elegant new tools to studying the warts and moles of existing languages."

"Ísland er ekki lítið land. Ísland er stórasta land í heimi."

"It was a very academic environment. That became frustrating because there was no pressure for results. I thought commercial applications would be more rewarding. But since then I’ve met too many people who want to make a career out of a project instead of completing it. That’s life."

"I like the observation that Forth is an amplifier: a good programmer can write a great program; a bad programmer a terrible one. I feel no need to cater to bad programmers."

"...there is a striking similarity in the surrealist and abstract painters attitude to the object;both have a horror of it in its proper context."

"The right creative act makes its own laws,and always will do."

"Having a little fun at my work does not make me any less of an artist and people who appreciate truly beautiful and original creations in pottery are not frightened by innocent tomfoolery!"

"About 80 percent of our customers buy our shoes not to compete in, but to wear in their leisure time."

"I agree. When I hear a player talking about how he "needs" to know about all the other details, I hear a player who is being adversarial to the GM and simply not trusting him to "get it right." Players like that make baby seals die and cause cancer with prolonged exposure. I don't write books for them."

"I know that when I write, I'm writing for people who can handle high-school math, read at the Grade 12 level, and appreciate subtle humor as opposed to the toilet-bowl kind. I guess that makes the lower cutoff about 17-18 years old."

"I think Joseph Beuys is the most missunderstood artist of the 20th century. He opened a door into art for any idiot and now they traipse around believing that they have to bestow their favour on this rubbish, although it has absolutely nothing to say."

"I'm a clown with brush and color."

"I've always felt that stylists such as you have in America are ashamed of a car and are preoccupied with making it look like something else, like a submarine or an airship...As an engineer, I revolt against this."

"Julie won a scholarship to Harvard. Graduated with honors and received another scholarship to Boston University Medical School. Julie became a medical doctor, alas, losing her medical license to a terrible addiction to heroin. As an ex-addict, she now manages Autoworld Go Carts in West Covina, California. She has the highest score on PacMan... Go Julie!!!"

"My talent lies in the expression of my life and creative power through light, colour and form. As a painter I can convey the essence of life."

"The photogram, image formation outside the camera is the real key to photography,it embodies the essence... that allows us to capture light on light sensitive material without the use of any camera."

"The experience of space is not a privilege of the gifted few, but a biological function."

"Designing is not a profession but an attitude."

"Not all Constructivists concentrate so strongly on reality. There are those for whom inner life plays an important part, such as the non-Russian Moholy Nagy, Kassak, and Baumeister etc. Their art painting figures often have a more symbolic meaning.. .Sometimes without any direct connection to reality.. .Moholy Nagy’s work is 'l’art pour l’art' - as opposed to El Lissitsky who is demonstrative.. ..in as much as he propagates the Bolshevist morale of not dreaming but doing."

"Moholy Nagy, [in contrast to El Lissitsky ], does not muddle the various technical areas, but limits each technique to its own area. Later, when he applies himself more to photography and film [in America], he champions pure photography and film and opposes the imitation of the art of painting in these areas."

"The essential is the object. Error consists in forgetting that grain, cotton, wool are vital objects and in being interested in them only because of their value in gold, their speculative value. The economic purpose is not 'to make millionaires out of gasoline' but to distribute gasoline according to demand and need. [Wall street] is an abstraction."

"The age we live in is largely – and I think mostly – 'objective', but a minority is reacting against this.. .My feeling is that I made colour – the colour plane – 'objective' in 1918, 1920 and 1921. There is a feeling of objectivity in all the great Primitives – but in 'the subject' there is no solution for the object, which has so much intrinsic value that it is 'highly explosive'; it destroys all the things around it, unless they have been designed specifically to serve as a setting for it."

"The love of simplicity, precision and clarity, is totally Western. Today's rational plastic form does not come from the Mediterranean or the Orient; it comes from the North [of France]. The North, younger, quicker less subtle, has seen straight to the heart of the new problem of construction that is posed by modern life."

"An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won't recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you'll say: 'What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it's a representational picture'.. .There is no such thing as 'abstract', or 'concrete' either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold.. .A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem."

"[a new order] ..independent of the values of the feelings, and the description and imitation of nature.. .The value of technique beauty without artistic intention resides in its organism and can be deducted at the same time by its geometric ambitions. I can therefore speak of a new order: the architecture of the technical world. Since the industrial object belongs to the architectonic order, it is assigned an important role in today's artistic creation."

"I myself have employed the close-up, which is the cinema's only real invention. The fragment of the object has also been of use to me; by isolating it you personalize it. All this work has led me to regard the phenomenon of objectivity as a new and highly contemporary value in itself [quote of c. 1927]."