Tae > Tae's Quotes

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and business in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening tho shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.”
― Bill Hillier, Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture

“[...] a white magician is just a black magician with a good housekeeper.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“One reason for the bustle was that over large parts of the continent other people preferred to make money without working at all, and since the Disc had yet to develop a music recording industry they were forced to fall back on older, more traditional forms of banditry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“The less of a life, the more mail you need”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“[...] we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“[...] it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“At meetings you have to explain what you've accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“[...] genuine power doesn't have to enforce it by example. Assumed power, on the other hand, requires folks' belief–it depends upon the victim's industry. Without that, it ... just sits in a room, referring to itself as authority.”
― Steve Aylett, Shamanspace

“[...] god's cowardly, it doesn't want to know or take responsibility for what it's doing.”
― Steve Aylett, Shamanspace

“Melody tried to distract me in a skirt made of brain skin.”
― Steve Aylett, Shamanspace

“We are a mirror to show god it's cruelty.”
― Steve Aylett, Shamanspace

“This continued a negotiation in the spirit of sinking hoods and strange smiles, all that elite malarkey.”
― Steve Aylett, Shamanspace