Quotes

She is the centrifuge that throws the spires from the sun

The Sistine Chapel painted with a Gatling gun

— Neko Case, Polar Nettles

And I have a feeling
That through the hole in reason’s ceiling
We can fly to knowledge
Without ever going to college.

— Patrick Kavanagh, To Hell with Commonsense

What we have today isn’t AI. That’s marketing, like describing processed soya as bacon.

— Nick Harkaway

In literature, you reach the universal through the particular.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

JavaScript is the fastest way to build yourself a slow website.

— Harry Roberts

This is a female text and it is a tiny miracle that it even exists, as it does in this moment, lifted to another consciousness by the ordinary wonder of type.

— Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

On Inishbofin he looked to the sky and saw fires on the moon.

— Kevin Barry, Roethke in the Bughouse

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

— Sara Teasdale, There Will Come Soft Rains

You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic. The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.

— Anon

I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth from orbit.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude

When the daily parade of the troubles you made gets you down, just consider the fate of the wide open space from town to town.

— Microdisney

The idea that only Designers should Design strikes me as a kind of protective gatekeeping, not unlike the idea that only Priests know the word of God, and it should be spoken in Latin.

— @PeterMe

… blogging is great isn’t it? You don’t have to write every week or every day. Just write when you have something you want to write about, and up it pops in RSS feed readers, or posted to Twitter, or whatever. Lovely.

— Phil Gyford

By theorizing well in advance of data, science fiction provides a framework for developing and testing ethical standards for the treatment of AI.

— Amanda Rees

https://www.noemamag.com/tales-of-technology-and-faith/

It’s a great time to be learning and investing in the primitives of the web platform over transitory framework abstractions.

— Jim Nielsen

Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.

— John Gruber

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

— Jon Postel, 1943 – 1998

Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.

— Marcus Aurelius, 121 – 180

My heart besieged by anger, my mind a gap of danger.

— Séamus Heaney, The Road To Derry

Given how fast framework complexity has escalated in the past couple of years, it feels like we’re at the point where not using a framework for web dev could be a strategic advantage for a new startup or company

— Baldur Bjarnason

When JavaScript is the first tool we reach for to solve every problem, we risk restricting access rather than expanding it.

— Jeremy Wagner, Responsible JavaScript

Put into strict UX terms, some things cannot be designed in a human-centric and empathetic way. And those things should not be built.

— Eva PenzeyMoog, Design For Safety

The idea that it’s alright to do whatever unethical thing is currently the industry norm is widespread in tech, and dangerous.

— Eva PenzeyMoog, Design For Safety

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