Favorite Work Quotes

• “We must suspend our judgment about an unfamiliar idea when we first encounter it and ask ourselves, “Would we value this idea if it were true?”
  - Dr. Gerald Zaltman, “How Customers Think”
• “The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.”
  - Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh
• “The blurring of boundaries and distinctions is one of the most significant cultural trends today. Fusion, convergence, merging, and morphing are all part of our intellectual, social, and creative lives.”
  - Elizabeth Padjen, Architecture Boston
• “Now concepts related to blurring, merging, hybrids, collaboration, and integration infuse even the food we eat.”
  - Mikyoung Kim, landscape architect, environmental artist
• “Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.”
  - Charles Mingus
• “In this society, a company’s competitive advantage will come from an historically underdeveloped asset: the ability to capture and apply insights from diverse fields, not just from business.”
  - Dr. Gerald Zaltman, “How Customers Think”
• “Prejudice is not automatically and immediately eliminated by changes in social institutions… People cling to ideas and behavior that are clearly not only in conflict with reality and developing knowledge, but are also destructive to themselves.”
  - Dr. Alexander Thomas
• “Confusion and clutter are failures of design [writing], not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design [writing] strategies that reveal detail and complexity — rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault viewers [readers] for a lack of understanding.”
  - Edward R. Tufte
• “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”
  - Orson Scott Card
• “Things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler.”
  - Albert Einstein
• “Work from a suitable design. Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise and work from a suitable design. Design informs even the simplest structure whether of brick and steel or of prose. You raise a pup tent from one sort of vision, a cathedral from another…”
  - Strunk & White, “The Elements of Style”
• “Principles of Composition rule #17: Omit needless words.
  Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
  - Strunk & White, “The Elements of Style”
• “Do not seek praise. Seek criticism… If instead of seeking approval, you ask, ‘What’s wrong with it? How can I make it better?’, you are more likely to get a truthful, critical answer. You may even get an improvement on your idea. And you are still in a position to reject the criticism if you think it is wrong.”
  - Paul Arden, “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be.”
• “You can’t create experience. You must undergo it.”
  - Albert Camus
• “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
  - Mark Twain
• “Do not put statements in the negative form.
  And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
  If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
  Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
  Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
  De-accession euphemisms.
  If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
  Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
  Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.”
  - William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"
• “It was a dark and stormy night.”
  - Snoopy