Quotes About Material

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.

For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.

I always collect images, maybe because I was working with historic material - but even if I were working with contemporary material, I would do the same thing. I keep a kind of index of them while I'm working. I find them incredibly useful, not so much to illustrate a time, but to give some sense of the feeling of a time.

Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.

In a way, the sense of quality has improved, the status symbol of the small things is gone, and it is acceptable to use stainless steel, even if the neighbour uses silver.

By giving material expression to force-forms in space, the Greeks gave divine spiritual beings the opportunity of using these material forms. It is no figure of speech but a fact when we say that gods came down at that time into the Greek temples in order to be among human beings on the physical plane.

One of the most obvious reasons to start using timber rather than concrete is that it's the one commonly grown and therefore exceptionally renewable building material that we have available to us. And it acts as storage for carbon dioxide.

Using a massive panel of pure sapphire for the front of a phone would be a little bit stupid.

The answer has to be sought in the material conditions of the production and utilization of cattle in India compared with the production and utilization of cattle in other parts of the world.

We went into this with the utmost respect for the source material, but we recognized the need for change.

There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

Nine out of nine architects start with a sketch, and then they say, 'What should we make it out of?' I start from the bottom up - what should it be made out of - and then I worry about what should it look like. The material, the color of the material, the way it feels, and the way you respond to it is every bit as valid as the form or the shape.

A good actor always sets you straight. If you've written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor's gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They're the great test of the validity of the material.

Now it is time to turn to an older wisdom that, while respecting material comfort and security as a basic right of all, also recognises that many of the most valuable things in life cannot be measured.

My grandmother was the daughter of pioneers, as was my grandfather, and they were farmers. And they worked the land, and there is a grounded value system that becomes inherent in knowing what's real and what's powerful. And understanding the material nature of not only man, but beasts and profit and all of those things that you fight for.

Another is pottery, which may have arisen from observations of the behavior of clay, a very widespread natural material, when dried or heated. Pottery appeared in Japan around 14,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent and China by around 10,000 years ago, and in Amazonia, Africa's Sahel zone, the U.S. Southeast, and Mexico thereafter.

Human populations of only a few hundred people were unable to survive indefinitely in complete isolation. A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture.

An example of a much more difficult invention is writing, which does not suggest itself by observation of any natural material. As we saw in Chapter 12, it had only a few independent origins, and the alphabet arose apparently only once in world history.

Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one's nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity

The greater the tendency to integrate man into mechanical and systemic effects, the more you have to swim against the tide, towards the hypothesis of the illogical sovereignty and material intelligence of things. This is not a mystical hypothesis. It is the only funny one.

The concepts of value, abstraction, speculation must be extended to cerebral matter, as they once were to the faecal matter of labour. Speculating on intelligence as grey matter valued like any other raw matter or material, with its equivalent in toytown money. . . This matter is the prey of our headhunters now.