Designers

"We need to figure out how to have the things we love, and not destroy the world."

"I'm trying to do useful things."

"Elon was wearing thin, I asked him to leave, I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!"

"Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place... Getting to Mars is too big an accomplishment for us to feel proud by just by swinging by. We are a nation of enterprise as well as exploration, and we're not about to go there without making something of it."

"[Comments from Christo Grozev of Bellingcat cited by Luce] "Musk is extremely influential. He has a cult following and he's purveying falsehoods. Because of his image among his followers as someone who knows the truth that others can’t see, he is more dangerous than a Trump.""

"Elon has always been an introvert thinker. So where a lot of people would go to a great party and have a great time and drink and talk about all sorts of things like rugby or sport, you would find Elon had found the person's library and was going through their books."

"He would go through two books in one day."

"Russia's slant on the world appears to have penetrated Musk's mind and he is by far Bellingcat's most famous detractor. Bellingcat's Twitter account has periodically disappeared from site searches and Musk himself often retweets conspiracy theories about the group."

"It's ironic that Elon Musk, the man who has been talking about getting us to Mars should be Putin's messenger for the war in Ukraine, when we're having a really hard time getting our act together on this planet."

""I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary," as Musk famously said in 2008. In the 15 years since, he has revolutionised electric transport, broken world records in space travel, become the wealthiest person in the world, and made more headlines in a week than most tech CEOs make in their careers."

"Wow, interesting. I didn't think it was possible to look uncool while wearing a leather jacket and telling people to go fuck themselves, but he pulled it off somehow."

"Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that 'free speech' is actually a $8/mo subscription plan."

"There’s a graveyard of prior attempts, a big graveyard. There’s probably some freshly dug graves just waiting to be filled. Our aspiration is to avoid that destination."

"I'm subject to literally a million laws and regulations and I obey almost 99.99 per cent of them. It's only when I think the law is contrary to the interest of the people that I have an issue."

"Blooper reel must be amazing."

"Musk isn’t promoting liberty; he’s using his power to privilege many of the worst voices in American life."

"Leon’s, I’ll tell you what, Elon, Elon, is not going to buy Twitter. … He’s got himself a mess. He said the other day, ‘Oh, I’ve never voted for a Republican.’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that. He told me he voted for me.’ So, he’s another bullshit artist. But he’s not going to be buying it."

"Sending large numbers of people to explore and settle Mars in the decades ahead isn't inevitable, but it is entirely possible. The biggest challenge isn't the engineering and spacecraft, however difficult they may be. Instead, it's making sure that a sustained Mars campaign proceeds as a national priority, and that will happen only if the American people are behind it. We have the opportunity now to make this happen. We might not be so fortunate in the future."

"I manage by absence. I go to the office two, three days a month, and those are the worst days for me. So the people on my team do what they want, when they want, but the results have to be perfect, crystal perfect. I cannot accept laziness or something that is not intelligent or any type of delay. If we say we will deliver a project on the 20th at 5 PM, on the 20th at 5 PM we shall blow the minds of the people we’re presenting to."

"I am sort of a modern monk. My wife and I have a collection of cabins in the middle of nowhere, and we stay out of everything. We don’t go to dinners. We don’t go to cocktails. We don’t go to movies. We don’t watch TV. I don’t use my energy on other people. I just work and read. I live with myself in front of my white page. Of course, for much of the year I have to travel, speak to journalists, engineers, things like that, and it’s the worst. But from the 15th of June to the 15th of September, I live completely secluded, locked in one of my houses, working from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, or making my own biorhythm: work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, work three hours, sleep 45 minutes, for 24 hours, without eating. It’s a little sick. But I’m like Dr. Faust. I signed a contract with the devil to sell my life for creativity."

"The enduring influence of Memphis can be seen in the groundbreaking work of French designer Philippe Starck. His prescient 1984 Café Costes interior combines futurism and nostalgia—a mix which resonates in subsequent projects like the 1988 Royalton Hotel in New York, and the long-legged lemon juicer he designed in 1990."

"Philippe Starck has said that he can design a chair in two minutes and a hotel in a day and a half. Preferring to work alone, sometimes “naked in the bedroom,” the Frenchman has devised thousands of products, interiors, and buildings for clients ranging from Microsoft to Baccarat."

"Nobody is obliged to be genious but everybody is obliged to participate."

"God is the answer when we don't know the answer."

"In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.”"

"I outlawed the word 'user' in all company meetings, and insisted it be replaced by the words 'my friend', 'my wife', 'my daughter', 'my mother' or 'myself'. It doesn't sound the same at all, if you say: 'It doesn't matter, it's shit, but the user will make do with it', or if you start over and say; 'It's shit, but it doesn't matter, my daughter will make do with it.' All of a sudden, you can't get away with it anymore. All of a sudden, you can't get away with it anymore. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning."

"Today, the problem is not to produce more so you can sell more. The fundamental question is that of the product's right to exist. And it is the designer's right and duty, in the first place, to question the legitimacy of the product, and that is how he too comes to exist. Depending on what answer he comes up with, one of the most positive things a designer can do is refuse to do anything,"

"[M]y main task when I was artistic director at Thomson for four years: to make the company virtuous. Not because there was a desire there to do evil, but because they had simply forgotten their purpose in life - to be of service, to use their skills to be of service. It is essential to try to play the role of a friendly "enemy within". That is, to catch the interest of these big companies so that they make money available, and research facilities, and distribution networks, for this return to what is the origin of all their activities - to serve others. It even means changing the words they use. One of the things I did at Thomson was to change their name. Thomson used to be called TCE, Thomson Consumer Electronic, and I asked them: who wants to be a "consumer of electronics?""

"I am just a copier, an impostor. I wait, I read magazines. After a while my brains send me a product... I am my brain's publisher."

"D'un point de vue structurel, le design est totalement inutile... J'ai essayé de donner à mes produits un peu de sens et d'énergie. Mais même quand j'ai donné le meilleur de moi-même, c'était absurde."

"[At Thomson] the other important thing I did was that I outlawed the word "consumer" in all company meetings, and insisted it be replaced by the words "my friend", "my wife", "my daughter", "my mother", or "myself." It doesn't sound the same at all, if you say: "It doesn't matter, it's shit, but the consumers will make do with it," or if you start over again and say: "It's shit, but it doesn't matter, my daughter will make do with it. All of a sudden, you can’t get away with it anymore. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning."

"I'm trying to move towards making objects which are honest, objects for non-consumers, for "modern rebels". Look, there are already millions of excellent chairs which are very comfortable, lamps which provide light, and so on. Is it necessary to create any more? The only question is: what will it bring to the human being who is going to use it? The urgent thing today is not to create a car or a chair which is more beautiful than another; what is urgent is for us all to fight with every means at our disposal against the fact that something is becoming extinct: love."

"The world wants water not taps, the world wants warmth not a heater."

"It is important to inject love into the place where you live. It is not healthy to rent an interior designer to create a home for you because it is not good to live in another person's fantasy. People should select for themselves and stamp their own identity on a place. They should mix and match everything to make their own cocktail."

"I have refused everybody, including A-list celebrities."

"A toothbrush is 28 grams of matter, 28 francs to buy and it's made to get rid of scraps of meat from between the teeth. Every gram of matter must provide its service as best it can. My trade is to be a producer of fertile surprises, an opener of doors in people's head."

"I try to rediscover why that object exists at all, and why one should take the trouble to reconsider It. I don't consider the technical or commercial parameters so much as the desire for a dream that humans have attempted to project onto an object."

"I think if I directly design their apartment, I will not help them... If you are rich and famous and you buy an apartment (house) and you don't know what to do, you will rent an interior designer. But in the end you will not make your own home. You will take the prefab life made by your interior designer and that is stupid. With ICON you will do it yourself."

"This museum is like a ghost train—at every stage you find a surprise. Intuition prepares you for enlightenment, not audio-visual lectures. There's less to read, more to fee."

"Everything I do is a symbol. Everything, has a meaning."

"My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision. poetry, surrealism and magic [to design]. We have to replace beauty, which is a cultural concept, with goodness, which is a humanist concept'."

"You must have your own responsibility, your own consciousness."

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

"Having a period of - well, austerity, shall we say - certainly humbles you."

"Technology's rapid development and our ever-changing lifestyles created a fundamentally new and exhilarating backdrop for building, and in this new world context I felt we must reinvestigate the aborted and untested experiments of Modernism – not to resurrect them, but to unveil new fields of building."

"Courage is defined as: the ability to face danger, difficulty, uncertainty, or pain without being overcome by fear or being deflected from a chosen course of action. Many of today’s world leaders have great courage: I wonder... would we be better off with cowardice?"

"Believing in an idea is dangerous! Because belief is absolute, and absolute, is unconditional, it is supreme, its ultimate and therefore fixed, which by definition will never be acceptable to change.'"

"A director is some what like a referee in a soccer match of sorts; ensuring all players play within the rules and boundaries of the game. His game."

"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... .'"