#si

Neither painting nor sculpture can any longer soothe. My soul turned to that Divine love. Who opened his arms upon the cross to take us. ↗

— Michelangelo

#expression #michelangelo #art

In their simplicity and directness [neon signage is] a kind of urban iconography with which we can identify on many levels. — Rudi Stern ↗

— Philip Di Lemme

#neon #urban #design

To have a style is to be stuck. ↗

— Jonah Lehrer

#design

The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle. ↗

— Heinrich Heine

#always #battle #go #into #march

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#everything #impossible #theoretically #until

It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg. ↗

— Donal Henahan

#better #desirable #exist #genuine #great

When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.) ↗

— John Varley

#nasa #pens #tools #writing #design

Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view. ↗

— Lillian Hellman

#believes #carriage #chamber #judge #nobody

Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice. ↗

— Lillian Hellman

#courage #final #hell #how #i

There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time . . . . We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!" Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad enius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, adn force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there. I wouldn't know; I'm not a genius, I'm an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job--and I might be some help on it, too. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#precision #war #change