[William Morris believed] that good and simple ways of doing things had been replaced by cheaper, quicker ones, which impoverished and made ugly the lives of many while making millionaires of a very few.
[William Morris believed] that beauty was not a luxury, and that luxurious and unnecessary things were actually unbeautiful, since beauty was so closley allied to necessity and nature
It's so easy to think you don't matter all that much at the very moment when your moral duty as a self is most exposed.
Design as a personal, ideological, or political action is important and useful; design as an industry is not. Why train students to be part of an industry? Why not train them to be active parts of the world?
Poethics: a linking of aesthetic registers to the fluid and rapidly changing experiences of everyday life; making sense and new sense (sometimes taken for nonsense) [of] ongoing poetics of daily life; linking between the individual and public ethics in pursuit of the good life by tolerating ambiguity and delight in complex possibility.
I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.
People are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
There's a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as "not useful" and which cannot be appropriated are the first to go.
In wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed.
Under capitalism, it is an unceasing battle to defend human life and dignity from the magnetism of the bottom line.
unhealthy peace vs healthy conflict:
avoiding conflict hurts those with the least amount of power the most
Priya Parker
[most science] moves us away from the center of things. You find out how unimaginably old the Earth is and you feel sort of dethroned. Many people can't bear it. If they could get into it, science could give them a much deeper sense of identification with all these marvelous processes that are going on all around us all the time, that we are part of.
Dickens talks about [the immediate profit attitude] in his novel Hard Times, making fun of the completely "realistic" businessman who can't think of anything but immediate use and profit and therefore loses any sense of there really being any future.
What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.
