Portolano Quotes & Sayings

Desire for power is a kind of greed indulged by the unfulfilled — Michael Foley

As I became more mature I realized that failure is part of success. — Robert G. Allen

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet? — Georges Perec

In a completely different era and domain, Charles Darwin hypothesized that the emergence of each new species was a gradual process, taking place through the slow transformation of existing species into their somewhat-modified offspring. Yet evidence for such continuous change was not only lacking back then but is scarce even today, having prompted Darwin to label it "the gravest objection [that] can be urged against my theory." Instead, over millions of years species in the fossil record show little or no evolutionary change. New species tend to appear over periods spanning tens of thousands of years, a split second in terms of all evolutionary time. Evolution proceeds in bursts, which are in turn preserved in the fossil record. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

For innovators, understanding the job is to understand what consumers care most about in that moment of trying to make progress. — Clayton M Christensen

I'm concerned with protecting the legal system. — Alexei Navalny

My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest ... no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak ... Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism ... true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village. — Mahatma Gandhi