Dieter Rams Quotes

You just look at the world, and you see things unraveling, and you say, 'I wonder what we ought to do?' Things are seldom crystal clear.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

The time will come when mankind will begin to get away from the consciousness of needing so many material things. More security and peace will be found in the simple life.

If it is not a mess, it is not progress.

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward. Rather, returning to a simpler way allows us to regain our dignity, puts us in touch with the land, and makes us value human contact again.

It is a simple procedure to calculate the number of seeds in an apple. But who among us can ever say how many apples are in a seed?

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

I figure that I'm always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It's the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.

There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves us to be wary at all times. Just when you think you've got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk's new album, and bam! You're as confused as you were when you first started.

And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning -- and, once decided, best unseen.

The world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.

Simplicity, very rare in our age.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

Risks are a measure of people. People who won't take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up having more. Some risks have a future, and some people call them wrong. But being right may be like walking backwards proving where you've been. Being wrong isn't in the future, or in the past. Being wrong isn't anywhere but being here. Best place to be, eh?

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

The greatest part of what we say and do is really unnecessary. If a man takes this to heart, he will have more leisure and less uneasiness.

In a world full of shifting borders, everything is happening all at once in every possible direction.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart.

I'm trying to keep up with what's happening in this turbulent world.

I worry that even those who want to reform are not quite sure how to go about it. There is so much to be done.

The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.