Top 100 Eisner's Quotes
#1. It was said Daredevil grew up in Hell's Kitchen, an amazing name for a neighbourhood. But that opened a Pandora's box of all the crime stuff I wanted to do. I borrowed liberally from Will Eisner's 'The Spirit' and turned 'Daredevil' into a crime comic.
Frank Miller
#2. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem-solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity.
Elliot W. Eisner
#3. In some sense our aim ought to be to convert the school from an academic institution into an intellectual one. That shift in the culture of schooling would represent a profound shift in emphasis and in direction.
Elliot W. Eisner
#4. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
Elliot W. Eisner
#5. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
Elliot W. Eisner
#6. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
Elliot W. Eisner
#7. It is rare to find a business partner who is selfless. If you are lucky it happens once in a lifetime.
Michael Eisner
#8. The limits of our cognition are not defined by the limits of our language.
Elliot W. Eisner
#9. Succeeding is not really a life experience that does that much good. Failing is a much more sobering and enlightening experience.
Michael Eisner
#11. You just have to make sure the model you're working on does not undersell your product.
Michael Eisner
#12. Michael Eisner contacted me once and asked me if he could change the name of Disneyland to 'Braffland.' I said no, because whenever I go to Disneyland there's always fat people everywhere wearing tight clothes. Disneyland, frankly, has a lot of improving to do before it gets my namesake.
Zach Braff
#13. I'm not sure I was a typical head of a company. Most people that run big companies come out of sales and they come out of marketing and they're quite serious and they have MBA's from very good schools and things like that. I'm an accidental CEO, thank the Disney Company.
Michael Eisner
#14. The whole business starts with ideas, and we're convinced that ideas come out of an environment of supportive conflict, which is synonymous with appropriate friction.
Michael Eisner
#15. Failure is good as long as it does not become a habit.
Michael Eisner
#16. A decision will be made before it's too late or soon thereafter.
Michael Eisner
#17. The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It's just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.
Michael Eisner
#18. It doesn't matter whether it comes in by cable, telephone lines, computor, or satellite. Everyone's going to have to deal with Disney.
Michael Eisner
#19. Sometimes you have to be worn out and burnt out to become authentic and original.
Michael Eisner
#20. When I read biographies, I'm only interested in the first few chapters. I'm not interested in when people become successful. I'm interested in what made them successful.
Michael Eisner
#21. The ultimate aim of education is to enable individuals to become the architects of their own education and through that process to continually reinvent themselves.
Elliot W. Eisner
#22. The arts inform as well as stimulate; they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself.
Elliot W. Eisner
#23. If you're soft and fuzzy, like our little characters, you become the skinny kid on the beach, and people in this business don't mind kicking sand in your face.
Michael Eisner
#24. If connoisseurship is the art of appreciation, criticism is the art of disclosure ... Connoisseurs simply need to appreciate what they encounter. Critics, however, must render these qualities vivid by the artful use of critical disclosure.
Elliot W. Eisner
#25. Michael Eisner let it be known last week that he had no intention of leaving the entertainment business once he steps down as CEO of Disney in October.
Peter Bart
#26. The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.
Elliot W. Eisner
#29. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
Elliot W. Eisner
#30. A brand is a living entity-and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.
Michael Eisner
#31. I grew up Jewish. I am Jewish. I went to an Episcopal high school. I went to a Baptist college. I've taken every comparative-religion course that was available. God? I have no idea.
Michael Eisner
#32. The movie business has always been like the wild-catting oil business. Everyone wants a gusher.
Michael Eisner
#34. I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form - in this medium - and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.
Will Eisner
#35. 21 years as CEO is a long time. I was and probably still am the longest serving CEO in America. Certainly I am in the media industry, bar none.
Michael Eisner
#36. Many people you think are individual achievers in fact have either a strong spousal partner over many years or a business partner who's either in the background, not given enough publicity or less egocentric.
Michael Eisner
#38. Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth. Minds are also forms of cultural achievement.
Elliot W. Eisner
#39. My strength is coming up with two outs in the last of the ninth.
Michael Eisner
#40. We all know that the Disney brand is our most valuable asset. It is the sum total of our seventy-five years in business, of our reputation, of everything that we stand for.
Michael Eisner
#41. I gravitate toward the team thing. I'm not a golfer - I much prefer basketball.
Michael Eisner
#42. We have inadvertently designed a system in which being good at what you do as a teacher is not formally rewarded, while being poor at what you do is seldom corrected nor penalized.
Elliot W. Eisner
#43. In every business, in every industry, management does matter.
Michael Eisner
#44. Graduate school is a place to hide for a couple of years.
Michael Eisner
#46. You either play by the rules, change the rules, or get out, altogether.
Michael Eisner
#47. CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna's firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving
Walter Isaacson
#48. Nick Cardy's work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.
Jim Lee
#49. The only thing that gives [new technology] purpose is the kind of creative content we all produce.
Michael Eisner
#50. Fear of failure is a far worse condition than failure itself, because it kills off possibilities.
Michael Eisner
#52. Privacy laws are our biggest impediment to us obtaining our objectives.
Michael Eisner
#53. Ive spent my whole life working in a medium that was regarded with contempt largely because of historical reasons.
Will Eisner
#54. Television is very much like the motion picture; you need high-end product that will first go on broadcast or cable and eventually on the Internet, and then the lifespan of this content being distributed worldwide.
Michael Eisner
#55. Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,
and let my obedience align itself with such iron
conditions
that the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shake
the deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.
Mark Eisner
#56. Content has always driven the business. Now it's no longer the queen to a king of distribution; it is the king, king, king, because the consumer has complete choice.
Michael Eisner
#57. We try to see patterns, to judge the events in our lives as rewards or punishment, parse things into good and evil. But there is a randomness to life that is beyond analysis...
William Eisner
#58. I think when you get inured with the past, you get committed to the past, you stop growing.
Michael Eisner
#59. Wake up in the morning
I shall wake up and so shall you and I
Wake up, the sun is beautiful
And it is warming you and I
Fragile as we lie
Bruce Eisner
#60. Bugs are not going to inherit the earth. They own it now. So we might as well make peace with the landlord.
Thomas Eisner
#61. Truth is the greatest of all national possessions. A state, a people, a system which suppresses the truth or fears to publish it, deserves to collapse.
Kurt Eisner
#63. Schools are not about enabling children to have a living but about children being able to have a life.
Elliot W. Eisner
#64. You can't succeed unless you've got failure, especially creatively.
Michael Eisner
#65. I always went into an area that was in last place, with a philosophy, 'You can't fall off the floor.' And I was lucky, was at the right time and the right place, with the right ideas, and each one of these areas became number one.
Michael Eisner
#66. There's a fine line between what would characterize you as a troglodyte and what would characterize you as a brilliant, avant-garde, forward-thinking genius. There's some middle ground.
Michael Eisner
#67. Humor has historically been tied to the mores of the day. The Yellow Kid was predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish. When you're different in a society, you're funny.
Will Eisner
#68. The company should be run from a creative point of view rather than a financial point of view.
Michael Eisner
#69. Doing stuff that I don't have to talk about because I'm not in a public company is fantastic.
Michael Eisner
#70. User-generated content is not done by professionals. The best user-generated content eventually becomes those people gravitated in the professional world.
Michael Eisner
#71. A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.
Will Eisner
#72. Creativity can flourish within sensible financial limitations.
Michael Eisner
#73. Recovering from failure is often easier than building from success.
Michael Eisner
#74. We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.
Will Eisner
#75. My best idea was to not accept my wife's negative reaction when I asked her to marry me.
Michael Eisner
#76. To punish failure is yet another way to encourage mediocrity.
Michael Eisner
#77. A company that pays attention to the family unit is a successful company. We don't isolate the family. We don't make rides that say, 'Hey mom, dad, you go sit on the bench.'
Michael Eisner
#78. If you're really good, you should express yourself ... a lot.
Michael Eisner
#79. A good journalistic organisation upholds four values: inform, reflect, crusade, connect.
Jane Eisner
#80. Over time, the product we produce has been consistently successful here in America and around the world. Apparently, we are doing something right.
Michael Eisner
#81. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
Elliot W. Eisner
#82. The kinds of nets we know how to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch..
Elliot W. Eisner
#83. I find that, once you get into a position where you can afford a pair of shoes and a decent level of living, success in itself is empty.
Michael Eisner
#84. Before World War II, I was living a very cloistered existence, as most cartoonists do. The work I was pouring out did not come from any real, personal life experience; this was all the residue of the accumulation of Rafael Sabatini, O. Henry, all the short-story writers that I'd been reading.
Will Eisner
#85. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
Elliot W. Eisner
#86. We cannot escape that Hollywood is in the middle of a wave of technological change. The current angst over all the implications of new entertainment technology is nothing new.
Michael Eisner
#87. I don't think individual achievement in business is the most meaningful way for it to operate.
Michael Eisner
#88. As for me, I am in pursuit of excellence. I have no time to get old.
Will Eisner
#89. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
Elliot W. Eisner
#90. I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted - romantically and/or sexually - to people of more than one sex, and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.
Shiri Eisner
#91. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
Elliot W. Eisner
#92. years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made
Walter Isaacson
#93. Biodiversity is the greatest treasure we have ... Its diminishment is to be prevented at all cost.
Thomas Eisner
#94. [Before the Spirit] I had been producing comic books for 15-year-old cretins from Kansas [I wanted to aim for] a 55-year-old who had his wallet stolen on the subway. You can't talk about heartbreak to a kid.
Will Eisner
#95. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
Elliot W. Eisner
#96. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
Elliot W. Eisner
#97. We are not an isolated insulated community anymore
Jane Eisner
#98. Thus, sped by currents of curiosity afloat the swift river of rumor do secrets sail to strange ports.
Will Eisner
#99. I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.
Will Eisner
#100. I find that no matter how long a meeting goes on, the best ideas always come during the final five minutes, when people drop their guard and I ask them what they really think.
Michael Eisner
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