William J. Mitchell Quotes

#1. Imagine a kind of system where you have lightweight electric vehicles relatively small battery capacity, and then picking up charge wherever they park. You never have to worry about filling up your car, never go to the gas station, never plug it in, never do any of these things.

William J. Mitchell

#2. We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn't seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn't seem necessarily to give us power over them.

William J. Mitchell

#3. We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.

William J. Mitchell

#4. People have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.

William J. Mitchell

#5. Exile is a series of photographs without texts.

William J. Mitchell

#6. What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.

William J. Mitchell

#7. Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

William J. Mitchell

#8. There is no magical solution because urban traffic congestion arises from the fact that a lot of people want to be in the same place at the same time often.

William J. Mitchell

#9. It matters because the emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse,

William J. Mitchell

#10. The essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer ... Computational tools for transforming, combining, altering, and analyzing images are as essential to the digital artist as brushes and pigments to a painter.

William J. Mitchell

#11. The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.

William J. Mitchell

#12. American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

William J. Mitchell