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"I would rather be ashes than dust!
"I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
"I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
"The function of man is to live, not to exist.
"I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
"I shall use my time."

--JACK LONDON, attributed


"No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids. Human beings built them, because they're clever and they work hard."

--GENE RODDENBERRY


"It is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer."

--BILL GOSPER, to me at VCF 9


"It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
Where erst Athena held her rites divine,
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
That crowns the hill and consecrates the plane;
But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brown of woe,
Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,
Match me such a marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city half as old as Time."

--JOHN WILLIAM BURGON, PETRA, Newdigate Poem prize, 1840


"He looked upon us as sophisticated children -- smart but not wise."

--SAXTON POPE, said of Ishi


"The engineers are our Hellenes."

--ADOLF LOOS


". . . They will gaze up and strain
to find the blue dot in their skies.
They will love it no less for its
obscurity and fragility. They will
marvel at how vulnerable the repository
of all our potential once was, how
perilous our infancy, how humble our
beginnings, how many rivers we had to
cross before we found our way."

--CARL SAGAN


"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

--FEUERBACH, epigraph, Debord's The Society of the Spectacle


"In our view it cannot be doubted that there must be in this land as much as in that from which Solomon is said to have taken the gold for the temple."

--HERNAN CORTES


"The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious."

--OSWALD SPENGLER


"The story of Star Wars is actually recounted by
R2-D2 one hundred years after Return of the Jedi."

--GEORGE LUCAS, to concept artists working on Episode III


“As slowly he sat up the ache suffused
his whole left shoulder where his life lay bruised,
tearing his death away like gauze, section by section.
Since that is all there is to resurrection.“

--AGNES NEMES NAGY, LAZARUS


“Pollution is nothing but the
resources we are not harvesting.
We allow them to disperse because
we've been ignorant of their value.”

--R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER


“Early in 1978, I started to write a story about the ultimate extension of computer memory systems; what would happen if you took predictive profiling to its ultimate extension and 'built' a duplicate statistical world in computer memory parallel with the 'real' world? The end result of this indulgence was an acronym; Orbital Biolab LA Grange Operations Node or OBLAGON.”

--SYDNEY J. MEAD, OBLAGON


You know who critics are?— the men who have failed in literature and art.

--BENJAMIN DISRAELI, 1870


”The rendering is a means to an end: the end is architecture.”

--HUGH FERRISS, 1940


”No one can keep you from living as your nature requires. Nothing can happen to you that is not required by Nature.”

--MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations 6:58


”The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the Persian might be added to the same family.”

--WILLIAM JONES, 1786, excerpted in Rapson's Ancient India: From the Earliest Times to the First Century A.D.


”Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway were removed, until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold -- everywhere the glint of gold.”

--HOWARD CARTER, The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen

"Architecture, sculpture, and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; orators, warriors, and statesmen, beauty, ambition, and glory, had lived and passed away, and none knew that such things had been, or could tell of their past existence . . . It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction . . . All was mystery, dark, impenetrable mystery."

--JOHN LLOYD STEPHENS, on his discovery of the Maya city Copán, originally of Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, reprinted in Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars

”Passion can create drama out of inert stone.”

--LE CORBUSIER, 1931

”What human beings need is ... a real
city which they can build, a place which satisfies the dreamer and is
acceptable to the scientist, a place where the projections of the artist and
the builder merge.”

--CONSTANTINOS A. DOXIADIS

”In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery”

--E.H. COLERIDGE

"A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive."

--FRANK HERBERT

"There is no such thing as a patriotic art or a patriotic science. Both art and science belong, like every higher good, to all the world and can be fostered only by the free flow of mutual influence among all contemporaries, with constant regard for all we have and know of the past."

--GOETHE

"This is the theoretical definition of a 'radical' urban system, rooted in the historical evolution of habitat. It is the view of habitat as a cluster of social, economic, cultural activities and of the kind of life it encourages. The notion of crowding is seen as a sine qua non condition for the inception of the Urban Effect. Thus crowding, far from being a necessary evil, is the imperative any form of life is blessed with because once crowding subsides, the system dies. With it the organism or the association of organisms (the city for instance) breaks down, as parts scatter away (suburbia) returning to the uncrowded surrounding expectant of a novel 'crowding together' into the next organism."

--PAOLO SOLERI

"If I compare the way in which a graphic sheet from my technique period came into being with that of a print expressing a particular train of thought, then I realize that they are almost poles apart. What often happened in the past was that I would pick out from a pile of sketches one which it seemed to me might be suitable for reproduction by means of some technique that was interesting me at that moment in time. But now it is from amongst those techniques, which I have to some degree mastered, that I choose the one which lends itself more than any other, to the expression of the particular idea that has taken hold of my mind."

--M.C. ESCHER

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--SOR JUANA INES de la CRUZ

"All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courage."

--WILLIAM BRADFORD, On Plymouth Plantation (1621)

"A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite."

--LEO TOLSTOY

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

--RICHARD DAWKINS


"The great buildings of the world that have endured don’t have any gingerbread."

--GORDON BUNSHAFT


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The Bottomless Table of FACTIUMS

ZODIAC: CANCER (shared by Syd Mead, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Robin Despins)

COLORS: mallard green, morpho blue.

WORDS: zebra, Palenque, lapidary, Saqqara, sheldon, fern, tusk, pseudo-, helix

NAMES: Ptolemy, Amarna, Sonora, Atacama, Aztlan

COMESTIBLES: Apples (most cultivars save crabapples), Bing Cherries, Table & Champagne Grapes, Milk Chocolate, Carrots, Celery, Cucumber, Raisins, Craisins

AROMAS: Pine

CONDIMENTS: Peppermint, White Pepper, Basil, Tapatío Hot Sauce, Cholula Hot Sauce, (authentic) Salsa Cruda

FLORA: Larrea tridentata (creosote bush), Darwin's champion (oldest 11,700 years), Aloysia triphyllia (lemon verbena)

LATERALITY: Right (with Syd Mead, Ron Cobb, Frank Lloyd Wright)

FICTIONAL CONVEYANCES: X-34 Landspeeder

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