Alan Vonlanthen > Alan's Quotes

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”
― Bill Bryson

“We have to stop marketing to people the way we hate to be marketed to.”
― John Morgan, Brand Against the Machine: How to Build Your Brand, Cut Through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition

“Too many businesses compete on price when they should be competing on value.”
― John Morgan, Brand Against the Machine: How to Build Your Brand, Cut Through the Marketing Noise, and Stand Out from the Competition

“As Douglas Adams wryly observed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they’re not really parallel, and two, they’re not really universes!”
― Marcus Chown, Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You

“The best thing about any grandmother’s house is the smell—like baby powder and fresh flowers, or maybe freshly washed sheets hanging in the sun, or sugar cookies cooling on a wire rack. If scientists could reproduce that scent and pump it into the open air, wars would cease, and whole armies would trade their guns for toys.”
― Jay Bell, Something Like Winter

“Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters—it embodies William Strunk’s famous dictum, Omit needless words, at the keystroke level.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“Everything points to the same conclusion: that Twitter hasn’t so much altered our writing as just gotten it to fit into a smaller place. Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai. This kind of in-depth analysis (lexical density, word frequency) hints at the real nature of the transformation under way. The change Twitter has wrought on language itself is nothing compared with the change it is bringing to the study of language. Twitter gives us a sense of words not only as the building blocks of thought but as a social connector, which indeed has been the purpose of language since humanity hunched its way across the Serengeti.”
― Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

“One regularly nips off around the globe projecting majesty and generally intimidating the world’s smaller nations on official State Visits, but being invited to spend a couple of days with one in the United Kingdom is generally considered the pinnacle of any lesser head of state’s time in office.”
― @Queen_UK, Still Reigning

“Never trust a man who insists on giving his middle initial out to all and sundry. It speaks of a deep-rooted self-loathing, in one’s experience. You never see one signing letters “Elizabeth A. M. Windsor”, do you?”
― @Queen_UK, Still Reigning

“There is of course one thing that the French love more than anything else: a revolution. They literally cannot get enough.”
― @Queen_UK, Still Reigning

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.”
― Steven Moffat

“One might be tempted to think that the many slights and rejections we scientists must suffer are somehow a necessary part of our education. But I don't think that way anymore. My experience with the music business has taught me to cherish every bit of feedback I can get, and not to think of the hundreds of unreturned phone calls or ignored pitches I must face as signs of personal failings. It was this change of perspective,
and the pressure it removed from my life, that first made me want to try systematically applying what I learned in the music business to the world of science.”
― Marc J. Kuchner, Marketing for Scientists: How to Shine in Tough Times

“Marketing is the craft of seeing things from other people's perspectives, understanding their wants and needs, and finding ways to meet them.”
― Marc J. Kuchner, Marketing for Scientists: How to Shine in Tough Times

“Your primary role should be to share what you know, not to tell people how things should be done.”
― Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

“Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.”
― Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

“It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. —KRUG’S SECOND LAW OF USABILITY”
― Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

“The task of education is not to teach subjects: it is to teach students.”
― Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

“Today, as a marketer, our task isn’t necessarily to “build a brand” or even to maintain a preexisting one. We’re better off building an army of immensely loyal and passionate users. Which is easier to track, define, and grow? Which of these is real, and which is simply an idea? And when you get that right—a brand will come naturally.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

“What matters is happy customers.”
― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing and Advertising

“my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude: Oliver Sacks

“Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude: Oliver Sacks

“People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas: A pomelo is like a grapefruit. A good news story is structured like an inverted pyramid. Skin damage is like aging. Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“Good metaphors are “generative.”13 The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many”
― Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day  . . . . fifty the day after that  . . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels:
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Strictly speaking, one never indulges in a gin before 5 p.m. Thankfully it’s always after 5 p.m. somewhere in the Commonwealth.”
― The Queen [of Twitter], Gin O'Clock: Gin O'clock: Secret diaries from Elizabeth Windsor, HRH @Queen_UK [of Twitter]