Textile Quotes & Sayings

I came from rainbow fabric; I drank textile ink as mothers' milk. I learned to sew before I could walk. I could never become a nun, purely because of the boring fashion choices. — Pepper Winters

The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages, — Barbara W. Tuchman

I'm not suggesting that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources. — Suzanne Lee

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols. — Walter Isaacson

These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely. — Jamie Zawinski

I bought a year's production of flax from a single field owned by a Dutch producer. That's 10,000 kilograms of flax, enough to enable industrial level production. Now, I'm weaving it into tablecloths, tea towels, and other items at the Textile Museum in Tilburg. I'm producing hundreds of grown-up products! — Christien Meindertsma

What was close at hand, visible, was that Communists were the leaders in organizing working people all over the country. They were the most daring, risking arrest and beatings to organize auto workers in Detroit, steel workers in Pittsburgh, textile workers in North Carolina, fur and leather workers in New York, longshoremen on the West Coast. — Howard Zinn

Importantly, the demand for day-care services to be provided by social insurance came from textile workers and not from the Mexican feminist movement. — Michelle L. Dion

I fear that CAFTA will accelerate the demise of these domestic textile jobs. — Howard Coble

What I resist is techniques. I find techniques very problematic. So when critics talk about my work in those terms, I find that they miss the condition. I am comfortable with the notion of pattern and ornament as a system of organization, [but] for me it acts as a textile. So it's not about pattern, but the notion of architecture through the lens of textile, rather than architecture through the lens of brick and mortar. — David Adjaye

In some conditions, the architecture of textile is more relevant than in other conditions or the opacity of the material form. Pattern in the world of scarce materiality and a hybridity becomes a way of creating a new authenticity. Sometimes there is a certain kind of nobility of a group of materials literally of the earth, which had a certain nobility of presence, but is very different from the materials we have now. — David Adjaye

I realized early on, maybe better than some of my competitors did, that a textile business can run only if you have scale. I decided to horizontally and vertically integrate, adding everything from spinning, dyeing, weaving, and stitching to processing and packing. — Mian Muhammad Mansha

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. — Walter Benjamin

Textile manufacturing was introduced to the city's economy by settlers from Prussia in the early nineteenth century. Around 18oo, several German industrialists established factories that catered primarily to an upscale market, producing only high-quality expensive woolen fabrics for wealthy customers. — Rebecca Kobrin

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs. — Lawrence Summers

My parents had a factory, so I was linked to the textile and fashion industry. — Francisco Costa

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven. — Walter Benjamin

All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality. — Alfred L. Kroeber

I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding. — Philipp Meyer

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can "see" history from the standpoint of others. — Howard Zinn

We're not handling things anymore before they arrive on our doorstep. I like to feel how thin porcelain can be, run my hand over a textile, see if I want to sit in a chair. — Nate Berkus

Most [Shetland patterns] are fairly small and simple, as textile patterns go. Almost all are symmetrical, with eight smaller parts. As a result, most are geometric rather than representational. ...
One last feature, less easy to define but easy enough to recognise ... is the liking for little motifs and for a pattern to be 'finished'. — Sheila McGregor

Renaissance cowboy/raconteur Pop Wagner ... deadpan funny ... his presence is like meeting Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers riding a single, many colored horse. Pop is a kind of 'textile genius' who is able to spin, at once, both yarn and rope. — Ron Miles

Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do ... Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all - the poverty, the degradation - she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors ... I shall never forget her. — Studs Terkel

Traveling around Ethiopia, I saw dozens of abandoned textile factories. People kept asking me to help them find work. So I thought I could make use of my experience in fashion to commercialize their products outside of Ethiopia. — Liya Kebede

Our Government's top priority remains jobs and economic growth. Today's announcement demonstrates our commitment to ensuring the continued success of western Canadian businesses and entrepreneurs in the apparel and textile sector. — Michelle Rempel

I was born Pauline Matthews and grew up in Bradford as one of three children - I had an older brother, David, and an older sister, Betty. My father Fred worked in the mills as a textile weaving supervisor, and my mother, Mary, was a housewife. — Kiki Dee

We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value. — Charlie Munger

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke. — Alvin Toffler

Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something — Terry Eagleton

They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master - I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov - my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood. — Maxim Gorky

I started to grow microbial cellulose to explore an ecofriendly textile for clothing and accessories but, very quickly, I realized this method had potential for all sorts of other biodegradable consumer products. — Suzanne Lee

One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything - tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn't matter. It's all productive work. — Ann Leckie

We are a country of artisans and a country of manufacturing. I think Japanese textile technology is the best in the world. — Tadashi Yanai

Our job as actors, especially in front of a camera, is almost like textile artists. We spend so much time getting the right texture of yarn, and working out the color scheme, and binding off the weave, and making it just right. — Anthony Heald

Every time that I wanted to give up, if I saw an interesting textile, print what ever, suddenly I would see a collection. — Anna Sui

My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan. — Susumu Tonegawa

Group, was only 29 when his father died suddenly in New York. His elder brother took the reins, but died of cancer just five years later, leaving behind a young widow and three children. Prior to that, another brother had decided to quit the family business. In parallel, a one year long textile strike spearheaded by Datta Samant had brought the textile industry to ruin; Morarjee Mills, the family's mainstay, was incurring massive losses. Piramal recounts that he survived those troubled times by reminding himself of one particular story: — Ashwin Sanghi

My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business. — Karen Mills

O most excellent of carpets," he said, "O brightest-colored and most delicately woven, whose lovely textile is so cunningly enhanced with magic, I fear I have not treated you hitherto with proper respect. I have snapped commands and even shouted at you, where I now see that your gentle nature requires only the mildest of requests. Forgive, oh, forgive! — Diana Wynne Jones

China's idea of fair trade is government subsidies of its textile and apparel exports to the United States, currency manipulation, and forgiveness of loans by its government banks. — Virginia Foxx

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does. For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles-which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones." — Charlie Munger

"Have you done your homework?" my mother would ask. "I'll do it later." "You will do it now, young man. I don't want you winding up on the third shift at Flagg-Utica." Flagg-Utica was a local textile plant. Somehow, I never could figure how failing to read three chapters in my geography book about the various sorts of vegetation to be found in a tropical rain forest had anything to do with facing a life as a mill hand. But with enough guilt and fear as catalysts, you can read anything, even geography books and Deuteronomy. — Lewis Grizzard

Light and color are closely linked. The colors can make a crucial change in nature, if you switch from daylight to artificial light or just from strong to weak illumination. In addition, color perception is affected by the material structure. Even if a piece of textile can have the same color as a shiny enamel plate, then they will act completely different. — Verner Panton

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. — Malcolm Forbes

The very same British and American families who had combined to wreck the Indian textile industry in the promotion of the opium trade [ ... ] combined to make the trade, a valuable source of revenue. In 1864 they joined forces to create causes for war and to promote the terrible War Between the States, also known as the American Civil War. — John Coleman

While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control. — Howard Zinn

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me. — Noam Chomsky

old textile mill, which was in the process of being — Richard Russo

Modern proletarian package: On day one we will work for ten hours in a polluted textile factory, passing the night in a cramped apartment block. On day two we will work for ten hours as cashiers in the local department store, going back to sleep in the same apartment block. On day three we will learn from the native people how to open a bank account and fill out mortgage forms. — Yuval Noah Harari

I guess the big thing is that I don't buy anything first-hand. It's a personal policy I have for all sorts of reasons. If you research to the textile industry yourself, you'll know why. I came to it personally. — Ezra Miller