UbuWeb on archiving

UbuWeb returns:

“In a moment when our collective memory is being systemically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.”

Jonas Mekas on Shadows

“A $15,000 film is financially unbeatable. Television cannot kill it. The apathy of the audience cannot kill it. Theatrical distributors cannot kill it. It is free.”

— Jonas Mekas on John Cassavetes’s Shadows

Emily Dickinson on silence

“Silence is all we dread.
There’s Ransom in a Voice –
But Silence is Infinity.”

— Emily Dickinson

Václav Havel on Totalitarianism

“At the bottom of all this lies a vague stress: people are either nervous, anxious, irritated, or else they are apathetic. They look as if they expect to be hit from an unexpected quarter. Calm and certainty have been replaced by aggression.

It is the stress of people living under a constant threat. It is the stress of people compelled, every day, to deal with absurdity and nothingness.”

— Václav Havel, Stories and Totalitarianism

Ray Bradbury on writing

“I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.”

— Ray Bradbury

Virginia Woolf on clarity

“One may not make things more clear by talking about them, but one can infect others with the same desire.”

— Virginia Woolf

Hannah Arendt on belief

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Blaise Pascal on the Stoics

“What the Stoics propose is so difficult and vain. The Stoics claim that all those who fall short of the highest degree of wisdom are equally foolish and vicious, as if those who were in two inches of water [were to be called as wet as those right in]. They conclude that what one can sometimes do one can always do, and that, since the desire for glory certainly causes those who have it to do something, they think others could do the same.”

— Blaise Pascal

Paul Bacon on designing

Paul Bacon on his approach to design:

“I always tell myself: ‘You’re not the star of the show. The author took three and a half years to write the goddamn thing and the publisher is spending a fortune on it, so just back off.”

— (via)

Milton Glaser on clichés

“Clichés are the basic tool of communication, so you have to be careful about how you use them, but you frequently find that they are the most powerful instrument you have in reaching people. But they are, after all, things that are commonly known, and you are always dealing in the realm of what is already known. If something is so ordinary and unsurprising in its observation, people simply won’t pay attention to it, and that is the other question of provocation. You have to re-imagine them. How can you penetrate people’s immunity is always the fundamental question of a designer’s work.”

— Milton Glaser