Milton Glaser talking about his relationship with painter Giorgio Morandi:

"It was Moriandi who taught me about dedication. He showed me the necessity of persistence, and that nothing good is ever easy. And that's because we see nothing at first glance. It's only by really thinking about something that we're able to move ourselves into perceptions that we never knew we had the capacity for."

The author goes on:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger referred to this as the unconcealing process. He argued, like Glaser, that the reality of things is naturally obscured by the clutter of the world, by all those ideas and sensations that distract the mind. The only way to see through this clutter is to rely on the knife of conscious attention, which can cut away the excess and reveal "the things themselves."

Our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of wayfaring.

Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.

Beginning to wonder how books like these will be possible in today's environment of privacy which does not deteriorate after death.

But to tear down a factory or revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

115th Psalm:

Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes they have, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; Noses have they, but they smell not; They have hands, but they handle not; Feet have they, but they walk not; Neither speak they through their throat. They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, every on that trusteth in them.

To design is the "build" a structure with an image inside the mind of the recipient. In this case, the materials are not only external stimulation but also massive amounts of memories awakened by stimulation. Designing highlights subtle differences between recalled memories and reality.

Pope Pius XII's concerns about media in the 1950s:

It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual's own reaction.