Are.na

”The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.” – Bertrand Russell

"Beyond the mountains, more mountains." – Haitian proverb

"Life is very boring if you live life as it is." — Fiona Hardy

“Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you.” — Calvin Coolidge

"Thought constitutes the greatness of man. Man is a reed, the feeblest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed." — Blaise Pascal

”Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” — John Kenneth Galbraith

Art & Fear

If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble. Art is human; error is human; ergo, art is error. — David Bayles & Ted Orland

"It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which t…

"It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which t…

"We all know the elephant in the room' — the topic that everyone knows is there, but no one talks about. But what about the mosquitoes in the room, the tiny things we sense but ignore?" — Mariana Ales…

"The way our group does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory." — John Dewey

from the artists way

“we correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”” ~julia cameron

"Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore les…

"I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game." — JG Ballard

“You pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world.” —Jay Alto

"A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of…

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." (Werner Heisenberg)

”The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest o…

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. –Oscar Wilde

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything th…

"With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder 'control,' and when they make a wasteland, they call it 'peace.'" (Tacitus)

“Waiting is not a passage of time to be traversed but a condition of our being … an opportunity to encounter those aspects of life deeply, perhaps neurotically, hidden in our busyness. In waiting, in …

"The no-talent has as much right to produce works as the artist has, and not only because he has a surprising way of shifting from one category to the other but also because men have an inalienable ri…

Plotting over a cup of tea

"I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying ment…

“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently" — David Graeber

”I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.” (Hunter S. Thompson)

Bret Victor

I'm figuring this out as I go. One's ability to articulate an idea always lags behind the understanding of the idea, and the understanding of an idea often lags behind the embodiment in which it is fi…

Equal shares

"Now, in oligarchies the masses make revolution under the idea that they are unjustly treated, because, as I said before, they are equals, and have not an equal share, and in democracies the notables …

“The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s tot…

Gall's Law

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have…

"Do not envy people that have money, comforts, fame and power, but rather those who live with virtue, reason and piety." -St. Paisios the Athonite