Jef Raskin Quotes

Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.

Mainly, my job is to be on the outside and bring ideas into the company and forge change. Most people hate change—it’s threatening. I thrive on it.

Steve Jobs did not start started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist.

Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em.

If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other; if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.

MANY MANAGE TO SEPARATE THEIR LIFE FROM THEIR FILMS. THEY LIVE ONE WAY AND EXPRESS OTHER IDEAS IN THEIR WORKS. THEY ARE ABLE TO SPLIT THEIR CONSCIENCE. I CAN'T. TO ME CINEMA IS NOT JUST MY JOB: IT'S MY LIFE, AND EACH FILM IS AN ACT OF MY LIFE.

I don't hate journalists. You can't hate a class of people. It's wrong to say that. But I do think they're a bit like poison. Never trust them. You can't trust them as a class of people. It's their job not to be trusted.

I need a challenge. I need the intellectual stimulation. I'm a member of a community on each film, working in concert to try to bring an idea to life. It's a great job.

I hate witches. Humans had the right idea, burning them at the stake.

Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work.

Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

I hate the idea that you ought to read the whole of anybody.

We are watching people who've been educated in the public school system and in colleges for the last 25 or 30 years become adults. They're getting jobs as TV commentators and journalists and writers and editors and producers in the media. And we're simply seeing the product of what they've been taught. And they so hate what they've been told is America's history and past that they want everybody to know they disagree with it and they've got nothing to do with it, and they had nothing to do with it, and don't blame them.

A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.

A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb.

I never liked the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.

but can everyone simply choose the path he loves? someone has to take the ordinary jobs. all i know is, that worked for me. and it didn't work for other people i know to get a so-called safe job, because there's no such thing anymore. the only thing that stays constant is the idea that people have to escape.

The Soviet constitution guarantees everyone a job. A pretty scary idea, I'd say.

If you're a leader at any level and your people aren't challenging you, you've got to change that or you can't be a leader here because you're not going to be using ideas, you're not going to have innovation, you're not going to fully develop your people. And if you're working in a group and you don't challenge, then you're not really doing your job.

Get a job and when you earn a little bit of money, then you can do more good. Then bringing your values doesn't mean you have to compromise yourself. You got to get over this idea that you can't work for a big corporation, or for big oil or bigger pharma, because actually, those are some of the great jobs are and you can do good there.

When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.

You don't want to do what your parents want you to do. You got your own things. And the whole idea of getting a job because of who your father is - that didn't isn't right.

And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.

I will say this: basically there in [MacGyver] was an idea and it was executed with a bunch of different things in mind, and that's where I will stop talking, because if I were to continue it might sound like I would be slagging off all of these people that I worked closely with, who did such a great and amazing job in their own right.

Schools have never been about getting access to information. That's the job of libraries. Schools and universities have nobler missions as gentle gatekeepers. Their role is to control ideas on the loose and to present the best and noblest ideas to the young.