inspired

Scattered throughout the site are quotes from others that have informed my user experience philosophy. Here they are in one place, with some friends.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now.
—African proverb

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
—Henry Adams

For actions, here are the biggest questions: what are the seriously considered options available to an expert? Then, what do naïve people do?
—Clark Aldrich

A positive user experience is the only method of differentiation these days. In the early days of the web, I mistakenly believed that brand drove user experience which, in hindsight, was an old media way of thinking. These days, brand (and everything else) follows user experience.
—Andrew Anker, Six Apart

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.
—Tim Berners-Lee

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance.
—Albert Camus

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
—Marc Chagall

Every CEO of a social network should be required to use the default privacy settings for all of their accounts on the service.
—Anil Dash

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
—Albert Einstein

Nothing is useful unless likewise honest.
—Erasmus

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—Galileo

You have to be on fire yourself to light one.
—German proverb

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement.
—Stephen Jay Gould

My experience is what I agree to attend to.
—William James

Personally, I think neither of these methods must be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Both may be used in turn by the same individual.
—Henri Matisse

Entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy.
—Karl Menger

You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
—Marvin Minsky

Any architect (physical or digital) needs to have one foot in the past and one in the future.
—Peter Morville

Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.
—William of Ockham

We often get blinded by the forms in which content is produced, rather than the job that the content does.
—Tim O’Reilly

Continuous eloquence wearies. [Or, I can haz lolspeak?]
—Blaise Pascal

You know you’ve got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed for.
—Clay Shirky

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly—to develop strategies of seeing and showing.
—Edward Tufte

Without an architecture of our own we have no soul.
—Frank Lloyd Wright

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?
—Stephen Wright

Braaaaaiiinns.
—Zombie