Quotes

The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

— Hans Rosling, Factfulness

Should I press “play” on the toaster?

— A thing I said, just now.

It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.

— Jennifer Senior

One of the biggest paradoxes of doing consisently good work is that it starts to make you think that good work is what makes you a good person.

— @DesigningInward, blowing my mind at #UXfest.

When you measure include the measurer.

— @MCHammer

I arrive at the bus station and immediately long to get away so I can miss the place again from the safety of some distance.

— Colin Walsh

Cynicism is a theory of everything.

— Rutger Bregman

Then make them real pages.

Completely agree with you there!

Big modals that are basically fake web pages—even if coded accessibly—feel deceptive, lacking in material honesty.

It feels like everything is falling to pieces outside, but remember that fundamentally, most people are actually nice to each other and when people aren’t nice to each other, it’s generally out of fear and hurt.

— Dan Hon

I felt it right there in my chest, the cool clutch of a cliché: my heart sank.

— Machines Like Me

My radio, with its irregular blobs of solder on a board, appears no less a wonder than consciousness itself arising from matter.

— Machines Like Me

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Control freak—now you say “Control freak who?”

It was a comforting myth, and one I embraced because I had seen comfort, without realising it was only a myth.

— Abolish Silicon Valley

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

— The Human Use Of Human Beings

In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.

— @freezydorito

The real measure of information is not in the symbols we send—it’s in the symbols we could have sent, but did not.

— A Mind At Play

The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. They crowd around chaotically, like Italians.

— The Order Of Time

Don’t design to control; design to give control.

— Gerry McGovern

…and all the fond nothings of daily life should clothe themselves in elemental sparks and shoot with fiery speed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere…

— A Thread Across The Ocean

Conquerers live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.

— The Stone Sky

If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.

— Sapiens

Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons.

— Sapiens

So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modelled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed.

— Hidden Figures

They sat there in the evening of the last day. And, though there was no actual point to it, they loved each other.

— The Best Of Richard Matheson

Photographs are photons on flypaper.

— The Ursa Major Moving Group

Language is imperfect; poetry, perfectly imperfect.

— Time Travel

And since we are speculating, we’ll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.

— A Fire Upon The Deep

Technology isn’t destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem.

— The Dream Machine

We are dead stars looking back up at the sky.

— Dr. Michelle Thaller

https://vimeo.com/95180201

The world spun the sun to the Center of the sky and then downward once more.

— Grass

The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve.

— Leviathan Wakes

The flower responded to the star.

— Helliconia Spring