Businesspeople From France

"It is quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look. They are quite wonderful you know."

"Every year Dior would present a new line – from Oval to Oblique to the Scissors look."

"Women, with their sure instincts, realized that my intention was to make them not just more beautiful but also happier."

"The Dior display suddenly made me nostalgic for France. What was before me was so clearly more refined than the other displays. And it stood out in my memory. Later when I was given the chance to buy Christian Dior, I remembered White Plains and Bloomingdales. I have no doubt that unconsciously it had an effect on me."

"We were emerging from the period of war, of uniforms, of women-soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla."

"In a machine age, dressmaking is one of the last refuges of the human, the personal, the inimitable."

"[Black is] the most popular and the most convenient and the most elegant of all colors."

"His greatest delight was in dreaming up a new costume, a talent he displayed early on. .. One year he transformed his sister into King Neptune with a bodice made of shells and raffia skirt …Never without a notebook, he scribbled down ideas as they occurred to him."

"I wanted to be considered a good craftsman. I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, molded to the curves of the female form, stylizing its shape."

"A woman's perfume tells more about her than her handwriting."

"You can wear black at any time. You can wear it at any age. You may wear it for almost any occasion; a 'little black frock' is essential to a woman's wardrobe."

"He gave no sign of any great desire to persevere with music or painting, despite his obvious eye for the latter. The idea of creativity obsessed but not to the point of renouncing his spectator status."

"We went from losses to goods seized by creditors, while continuing to organize surrealist or abstract exhibitions…"

"If my poor maman had still been alive, I would never have tried"

"It is unforgivable to do what one doesn't love especially if one succeeds."

"Women are most fascinating between the ages of 35 and 40, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass 40, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely."

"Colour is what gives jewels their worth. They light up and enhance the face. Nothing is more elegant than a black skirt and sweater worn with a sparkling multi-stoned necklace."

"Bright reds – scarlet, pillar-box red, crimson or cherry – are very cheerful and youthful."

"In Shirley Miles O'Donnol American Costume 1915-1970: A Source Book for the Stage Costumer, Indiana University Press, 22 August 1989, p. 153"

"A dress is a piece of ephemeral architecture, designed to enhance the proportions of the female body."

"Efficient financial regulation theories necessarily derive from lucid postulates about the general invariability of human nature, specifically where financial institution executives are involved (see the latest contributions from the field of evolutionary psychology). There is little chance that this will change much over the next few decades -but it is no use complaining, seeing as greed has always been (and will always be) one of the most powerful drivers of capitalist progress."

"An inherent paradox of intellectual activity is that reflection (i.e.the phase were a research project is trying to process a complex problem) can be very time-consuming . Unfortunately, it is only when researchers are driven by a sense of urgency that they can make real progress."

"Structural reforms and respecting European treaties are the two pre-requisites to reduce deficits in the long-term and boost the economy’s potential growth rate which, at around 1%, is much lower than the government estimates (close to 4%). It is the French economy’s ‘corsets’ that are to blame for the country’s weak growth (both potential and recorded) which itself generates the deficits and not the austerity policies made necessary by galloping deficits as partisans of the so-called demand- led policy think. The French economy is primarily ill because of its public finances."

"In the developed world taxation is always a political construct, a living organism that is always changing due to endless modifications imposed by lawmakers who are themselves sensitive to the public mood and to changes in social ideology. This is a haphazard scaffolding without an architect that lacks rationality and coherency, with tax and social expenditures- referred to here as social and tax expenditures - constituting a superstructure that is all the more complex given its roots in a tax system whose benchmark standards are subject to innumerable exceptions."

"In developed countries, successive governments have always acted like firemen putting out fires instead of architects designing new buildings. The tax loopholes they have created are responses to emotions provoked by a given event, or an attempt to ease social tension caused by taxpayer exasperation (and/or reflecting their power). Any rational global management policy must satisfy two imperatives: simplicity; and stability."

"Despite a relative control over expenditure in 2013, the persistence of a very high public deficit (4.3%) was mainly due to an unprecedented and unexpected drop in tax revenue which confirms the existence of a tax tolerance threshold, specific to each country, and which may have been reached in France. Above this threshold, any tax increase has a counterproductive effect as compulsory taxes stifle activity by further weakening the economy’s growth potential."

"The aptitudes needed to conduct a real research project are fundamentally different from the ones needed for purposes of scientific vulgarisation (like education). This is because above and beyond a capacity for understanding problems and thinking and expressing oneself clearly – something that every good teacher has –an enormous amount of perseverance and stamina is necessary, and above all a scientific approach rooted in real inventiveness."

"Thirty years of lax budget policy (the Trente Dispendieuses) marked by soaring public spending in the 1980’s, the happy-go-lucky attitude of the 1990’s and finally, a policy of procrastination in the 2000’s characterised by the development of creative budgetary marketing strategies exclusively destined to delay the (always) socially and politically painful moment of addressing the accounts."

"At the end of the current five-year presidential term and the “Trente-Six Dispendieuses” (36 years of uninterrupted deficits from 1981 to 2017) far-reaching public expenditure reforms will be required. These will be all the more painful as they are far too late."

"The government is making another mistake, although purely ideological this time, by thinking about the responsibility pact in terms of contracts that would give rise to reciprocal concessions from companies. Indeed, the government cannot negotiate with companies because the decisions of business leaders are always individual. They are not civil servants working to orders, but free and lucid agents who make their decisions, particularly on investment and job creation, by individually assessing their risks based on the stability of the environment and the favourable outlook for returns on investment. By contrast, an effective government can, and must, create the right circumstances for investment decisions to generate the conditions for growth."

"Common wisdom holds that the most complicated thing in the universe (asides fom the universe itself) is the human brain. In actual fact, however, other objects are even more complex – starting with human society, especially today’s hypermodern society, a product of thousands and even billions of human brains; not to forget globalisation and the Internet."

"Misapprehensions about the crucial question of whether Management constitutes a scientific discipline stem, in my view, from the multiplicity of perspectives involved: theoretical; normative; technical/educational; and practical. This makes is far too easy for critics to deride practical advice developed in this field, something they assimilate far too readily (and erroneously) with ready-made solutions, ignoring the epistemological vision underlying all management studies."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"[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."

"[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?""

"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.”"

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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'."

"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 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."

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

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