Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Quotes

We dried continuously day and night. We had no efficient way to do it, so we built this new popcorn plant.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

To live is to express, and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. To live is to express oneself freely in creation.

Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

Industrialization of the building trade is a question of material. Hence the demand for a new building material is the first prerequisite.

You don't need personal fabrication in the home to buy what you can buy because you can buy it. You need it for what makes you unique, just like personalization.

All my collections are very personal. It's also because I'm so involved in making the collections.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

The man who places a part does not fasten it. The man who puts in the bold does not out on the nut. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks, on overhead chains …. It may travel on a moving platform or go by gravity.

The key to making things affordable is design and technology improvements, as well as scale.

When I create something, it's got to be special, and it can't just be to throw something out there because I feel like I'm Missy.

Television shows are not like cars or operating systems, and they are not best made by engineers or coders in the same assembly line manner as consumer products which need to be of uniform size, shape, and quality.

The world of design has been subjugated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.

All our forms are unique - movies, music and literature - and you have to leave the person who is doing it to do their best.

If you're going to be an artist, you need to be an original.

You can’t learn your craft by copying me or anyone else. I hope what I do can do is in some way inspire others but I would be appalled if I thought my work was being studied as ‘the right way to do the job’. My way is just one of an infinite number of ways to do the job.

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.

Creativity, which is the expression of our originality, helps us stay mindful that what we bring to the world is completely original and cannot be compared.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

Imitation always stinks. When I take photos, I don't go back. I don't look at the past. I'm always original.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.