A Quote by Jeffrey Zeldman

Thanks to budget shortfalls and format wars, our traditional media, literature, and arts are perishing faster than ever before. Nothing conceived by the human mind, except Heaven and nuclear winter, is eternal.
We have devoted ourselves to the government and extension of the Church, and, among other objects, we have conceived it to be our duty to foster especially literature and the fine arts ... next to knowledge and true worship of the Creator, nothing is better or more useful to mankind than such studies.
Nothing endures except change; nothing is constant except death. Every heartbeat wounds us, and life would be an eternal bleeding to death, were it not for literature. It grants us what nature does not: a golden time that doesn't rust, a springtime that never wilts, cloudless happiness and eternal youth. [my translation]
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.
There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.
There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.
The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.
...nothing ever happens quickly (except when it does). Nothing is ever, ever easy (except when it is). And, most of all, nothing ever goes perfectly according to plan (except in the movies).
It's more necessary than ever before to ensure that discernment and the development of a critical mind guide our take on the world and inform our relationship to the media and information.
We have a crisis in nuclear weapons, and again, thanks very much to the Democrats: Bill Clinton, who removed us from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty framework for nuclear disarmament, and then Barack Obama, who created a trillion-dollar budget for us to spend on a new generation of nuclear weapons and modes of delivery.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.
All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.
With the nuclear threat we know that if sufficient weapons are used, human civilization - all of humankind - could be extinguished literally by "nuclear winter." So we have to see ourselves as part of the ultimate human group, just as we have to do with global warming.
We've established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived... and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing!
We must get away from the traditional idea that the saints in Heaven have one eternal holiday; that they have nothing to occupy them save playing a harp and incessantly singing.
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