Bran Ferren Quotes

Vibrant companies must put together five-year plans. But they must be willing to change these five-year plans every single year.

When the first alien spacecraft lands in Washington, I want the little green people to walk first into the National Gallery of Art. I want our art to explain who and what we are before our leaders do.

Great art isn't about decoration - it's a different language that can both touch our hearts, and open our minds.

Art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering.

We need to love [children] and help them discover their passions. We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success, as is perseverance.

The Net, I guarantee you, really is fire. I think it's more important than the invention of movable type.

It's disgraceful and embarrassing that the highest technology in a typical inner city high school in this country is the metal detector the students pass through at the front door.

There's no Bits, like Show Bits

The Internet represents the greatest story telling technology since the development of language. It will be far more important than reading and writing as a purposeful tool. Everything that is enabled by story telling will be enabled by the Internet.

Most products are ugly. The harsh reality is that in many of these markets, form follows funding. And that products go where the market takes them.

In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad.

[Visionaries] not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done.

Being a successful inventor, starts with being curious, and asking the right questions.

A ‘good 10 percent’ of American products comes out of big-idea organizations that don’t believe in talking to the customer. They’re run by passionate maniacs who make everybody's life miserable until they get what they want.

[On the need for ultra high definition television] The problem with television isn't the number of horizontal scanning lines. It's the lines of dialogue spoken by the actors.