David Berman Quotes

We visual communicators have so much good to share: rather than sharing our chemical and style addictions, we could be using our professional skills to help communicate health information, conflict resolution, democracy, technology.

Somewhere in the future I am remembering today.

Over 95% of the designers who have ever lived are alive today. Together, we have the power to define what professionalism in the communications industry will be about: helping increase market share or helping repair the World.

Designers must educate the public that design is about strategy, not decoration. However, such attempts are repeatedly undermined by a design world hooked on competitions and awards ceremonies that celebrate creativity instead of strategy results and sustainability.

You can't change the feeling but you can change your feelings about the feeling in a second or two

When there's trouble I don't like running, but I'm afraid I got more in common with who I was, than who I am becoming

Romance is the douche of the bourgeoisie.

There is a person whose acquaintance and conversation I do earnestly recommend unto you as thing of the greatest advantage: you will be surprised when I tell you it is yourself.

Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x.

Spend regularly and constantly two or three hours of the morning in study and retirement. I do not take upon me to prescribe what you shall employ yourself about. I only propose the passing two or three hours of the twenty-four in private.

Unless we take care to clear the first principles of knowledge from the incumbrance and delusion of words, we may make infinite reasonings upon them to no purpose. We may deduce consequences, and never be the wiser.

I am about to learn what it's like to live here.

Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophesy doth to others. Even they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration.

For it oft happens that a notion, when it is cloathed with words, seems tedious and operose and hard to be conceived, which yet being striped of that garniture, the ideas shrink into a narrow compass, and are viewed almost by one glance of thought.

It takes a society to raise a generation.

It would be wrong of me to suppose that just because I can form private mental images, that everyone can. As Francis Galton and William James long ago showed, a small proportion of adults-and some of these extremely intelligent-are unable to form such visual images. Berkeley's point is that it would be equally arrogant for these non-thinkers or non-image formers to claim that everyone is like them in the relevant respect. The temptation to pontificate in that way reveals a narrowness and unwillingness to see the world from another perspective.