Quotes from Victor Papanek

Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.

Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don`t need, with money they don`t have, in order to impress others who don`t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.

Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

Design is basic to all human activities - the placing and patterning of any act towards a desired goal constitutes a design process.

It would be tedious to continue piling example upon example, statistic upon statistic. For at a certain point, a feeling of deep lethargy sets in, and our reaction is: 'What's the use?' or 'What can one man possibly do?' If we respond in this manner, we are lost. For it is precisely by shifting problems from the trivial to the tragic plane, by forsaking a personal view for a cosmic one, that we rationalize and manage to shrug off our own personal responsibility.

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.

You are responsible for what you put into the world.

There are professions more harmful than industrial design but only a few of them

Design is a conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order. Design is both the underlying matrix of order and the tool that creates it.

Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order

If design is to be ecologically responsible, it must be independent of concern for the gross national product.