Lego Bricks Quotes

Now there's a black market for toys at our school. Christopher Stangel brought in a bunch of Legos from home yesterday, and I hear a single brick will set you back fifty cents.

There’s more to innovation than just putting other people’s ideas together like LEGO bricks.

It was much smaller than her own, but everyone seemed closer, as if each member were organically attached to one seamless body, whereas her enormous extended family felt like cheerfully mismatched Lego bricks in a large bucket.

Mrs Pitt shouted up the stairs for her daughter with a voice like a foghorn, then smiled cheerfully at Calvin. "She'll be down in a mo," she said, and showed him in to the front room, which was a colourful sea of Lego bricks with a small child bobbing in it.

I, like balloon animal hacks everywhere, can only make one animal so far. It is a LEGO version of the Island of Dr. Moreau, wherein I have brick-engineered a pig-camel, a dog-camel, and a camel with wheels. These monstrosities are quickly torn apart, and I wonder if I have some unresolved camel issues.

you don’t think yourself into a new way of acting, you act yourself into a new way of thinking.

Every morning, as I walk into Pixar Animation Studios—past the twenty-foot-high sculpture of Luxo Jr., our friendly desk lamp mascot, through the double doors and into a spectacular glass-ceilinged atrium where a man-sized Buzz Lightyear and Woody, made entirely of Lego bricks, stand at attention, up the stairs past sketches and paintings of the characters that have populated our fourteen films—I am struck by the unique culture that defines this place. Although I’ve made this walk thousands of times, it never gets old.

When Ole Kirk Kristiansen established the company name LEGO in 1934, it was a fortunate play on words. The entrepreneur had been inspired by the Danish phrase "leg godt" - "play well." He took the beginning of each respective word and made what he considered to be a pleasant-sounding, imaginary word out of them. The company owner was unaware that as the first person present singular of the verb legere, "lego" is also the Latin word for "I assemble" - and therefore completely appropriate for the modularity of the company's later invention, the LEGO brick.

replica. Properly, a replica is an exact copy, built to the same scale as the original and using the same materials. To use the word when you might better use ‘model’, ‘miniature’, ‘copy’ or ‘reproduction’ devalues it, as here: ‘Using nothing but plastic Lego toy bricks, they have painstakingly reconstructed replicas of some of the world’s most famous landmarks’ (Sunday Times).

Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been manufactured from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer - ABS copolymer for short - a plastic with a matte finish. It is very hard and robust - import criteria for a children's toy. Laboratories in Switzerland and Denmark regularly test the quality of the ABS. The plastic is distributed to factories as granules rather than in liquid form. These grains of plastic are heated up to 232ºC and converted into a molten mass. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tonnes squeeze the viscous plastic mass into the desired injection moulds - of which there are 2,400 varieties. After seven seconds, the brick produced in this way has cooled down enough to be removed from the mould. The injection moulding method is so precise that out of every million elements produced, only about 18 units have to be rejected. Unsold bricks are converted back into granulates and recycled.

If LEGO were to reenergize product development and appeal to the world’s plethora of ethnic groups and play experiences, it would have to break out of Billund.

A handful of elementary ingredients that act like bricks in a gigantic Lego set, and with which the entire material reality surrounding us is constructed. The nature of these particles, and the way they move, is described by quantum mechanics.

A child, maybe five, catches my eye. He has stacked his Lego bricks into a tall building. After showing everyone his feat, he pulls one arm back and with a swift chop tumbles them all to the ground. A human instinct, I muse. Destroy that which we have built.

2. Words Define Reality Words are like LEGO bricks: the more we add, the more we define the reality of our playset. "The dog fucked the chicken" tells us something. "The Great Dane fucked the chicken" tells us more. "The Great Dane fucked the bucket of fried chicken on the roof of Old Man Dongweather's barn, barking with every thrust" goes the distance and defines reality in a host of ways

Kasselton High was big, nearly two thousand kids in four grades. The building was on four levels, and like so many high schools from towns with constantly growing populations, it ended up being more a series of pieced-together add-ons than anything resembling a cohesive structure. The later additions to the once-lovely original brick showed that the administrators had been more interested in substance over style. The configuration was a mishmash, looking more like something a child had made by mixing wooden blocks, LEGOs, and Lincoln logs. Last

The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence.

And then we came to a stop in front of a large yellow Victorian house that sat, so stately, between two brick buildings, like a misplaced Lego piece, overgrown with ivy and bluebells and honeysuckle. The Daffodil Inn looked exactly how I'd imagined. The bed-and-breakfast was fresh and bright, the dentils all painted across the edging on the roof, the corbels replaced, the sawn spandrils and turned spandrils all given proper attention. The bay window was set with a stained-glass daffodil, the same one that encrusted the window in the front door. Around the inn, encasing it like a lovely cage, was a wrought-iron fence overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle that bled into the rose garden that surrounded the house.

Standardization can obviously go too far. Surely you’ve tried to make something out of LEGO bricks, only to find you couldn’t achieve your vision. There are only so many different blocks, so you can only do so many things. The key to standardization is to create constraints that will make your production process smoother, without compromising the essence of what you’re trying to achieve. If you choose your constraints wisely, they can actually enhance creativity. Robert Frost said writing in free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. He had better ideas because he was following poetry’s constraints.

motherhood had its own, uniquely powerful way of tearing women apart. I knew having a child wouldn’t be all gurgles and cuddles. I knew my future could hold pain as lethal as stepping on a Lego brick in the dark.

Though it lay several miles to the west, she felt the high school as she passed by. Without even laying eyes on that place, she could feel it like an ache. Some institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look. She marveled at the power the American high school experience holds on the imagination. She’d always noticed how people tended to view their high school days as foundational even if they didn’t realize it. Get them talking about those years, and they suddenly had all these stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around.

EARTH, which is life giving—so respect its boundaries Far from floating against a white background, the economy exists within the biosphere—that delicate living zone of Earth’s land, waters and atmosphere. And it continually draws in energy and matter from Earth’s materials and living systems, while expelling waste heat and matter back out into it. Everything that is produced—from clay bricks to Lego blocks, websites to construction sites, liver pâté to patio furniture, single cream to double glazing—depends upon this throughflow of energy and matter, from biomass and fossil fuels to metal ores and minerals. None of this is news. But if the economy is so evidently embedded in the biosphere, how has economics so blatantly ignored

Lego bricks don’t make a watertight seal when you connect them together,​[​

30. The first Google server casing was built from LEGO bricks. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the masterminds behind the largest IT project in the world started out with little beyond a pile of budget PC components assembled – or, better to say, scrapped – together. In 1996, they had to assemble multiple components, such as ten hard disks, into working clusters, the expenses for such machinery left them without funds to buy a decent computer casing. Thus, they built the casing from LEGO building blocks. Two years later, it was superseded by a large production server rack. Then, two years after that, their computing power counted around 5,000 (yes, five thousand) computers, and today the number is estimated to between 1,5 and 2 million. Talk about investment and growth!

Son of a bitch. Blake probably knew something like this would happen. He set me up. He did it on purpose. “I don’t have to negotiate in good faith,” I tell his father. “You brought money into this in the first place. That was a dick move. Why should I play fair?” “You’ve admitted that you’d sell him out,” he snaps. “That at some point, money is more important than he is.” “You’ve admitted the same thing. If I’m a faithless whore because I’ll take a check to break up with Blake, you’re the asshole who values his company and lifestyle more than your son.” “That’s not just my company. That’s my life. It’s his life. It’s—” “Oh, and you think it’s just money for me?” I glare at him. “You think that you’d give me fifty thousand dollars and I’d spend it all on shoes and diamond-studded cat collars? Fifty thousand dollars would pay for the rest of my college tuition. It would buy my dad a lawyer so that the next time his knee acted up, he could finally get disability instead of scrambling to find some job he can manage. It would make it so I didn’t have to work for the next year and could concentrate on my schoolwork. That’s a really ugly double standard, Mr. Reynolds. When money exists to make your life more pleasant, it’s not just money. But when it’s my family and my dreams at stake, it’s just pieces of green paper.” Blake smiles softly. His father reaches across the table and flicks Blake’s forehead. “Stop grinning.” “No way.” Blake is smiling harder. “She’s kicking your ass. This is the best day ever.” His father grunts. “The day I first went to lunch with Blake, I had less than twenty dollars in my possession. Total,” I tell his father. “I would completely sell Blake out for fifty thousand dollars. Some days I’d do it for ten. Dollars. Not thousands. None of this makes me a gold digger. It just means that I’m poor. When times get desperate, I’ll pawn anything of value to survive. I might cry when I do it, but I’m going to be realistic about it. So take your stupid does-she-love-Blake test and shove it.” Mr. Reynolds looks at me. He looks at Blake. And then, very slowly, he holds out his hands, palms up. “Well. Fuck me twice on Sundays,” he says. From the expression on his face, I take it that this is intended to be a good thing. “First time I talked to her,” Blake says with a nod that could only be described as prideful. “Before I asked her out. I knew I had to introduce her to you.” “Shit,” Mr. Reynolds says. He holds up a fist, and Blake fist bumps him in return. Now they’re both being dicks. “Smile,” Blake’s dad says to me. “You pass the test.” “Oh, thank goodness.” I put on a brilliant smile. “Do you really mean it? Do you mean that you, the one, the only, the incomparable Adam Reynolds, has deigned to recognize me as a human being? My life is changed forever.” Mr. Reynolds’s expression goes completely blank. “Why is she being sarcastic, Blake?” “Why is he talking to you like I’m not here, Blake?” Mr. Reynolds turns to me. “Fine. Why are you being sarcastic?” “You don’t get to test me,” I tell him. “You’re not my teacher. You don’t get to act like you’re the only one with a choice, and I have to be grateful if you accept me. I don’t have any illusions about me and Blake. Fitting our lives together is like trying to finish a thousand-piece puzzle with Lego bricks. But you know what? Bullshit like this is what’s going to break us up. You had a test, too. You could have treated me like a human being. You failed.” Blake reaches out and twines his fingers with mine.

Sometimes brands make a stand more quietly. Deep inside one of the world’s most famous factories, located in the tiny town of Billund, Denmark, more than a hundred engineers and scientists are collaborating to redesign a product that has worked perfectly for more than eighty years. The LEGO Sustainable Materials Centre, a well-funded group within LEGO, is dedicated to finding more sustainable materials within the next decade to make the company’s iconic bricks. In 2018 the group launched its first innovation, making flexible pieces such as leaves and palm trees from a plant-based plastic sourced from sugar cane. This sense of commitment to the environment is deeply felt at LEGO. Its efforts may inspire more such initiatives across the toy industry, especially if consumers take note of LEGO’s efforts and demand similar forward-looking commitments from other companies as well.

Even today, LEGO continues to embrace one of founder Ole Kirk Christiansen’s core values: to never let war seem like child’s play.

Unburdened by the legacy costs and organizational inertia of more mature competitors, these new technologies quickly replaced established technologies and destroyed the incumbents’ core markets.

the move toward object-oriented programming, where applications could be fashioned out of small, predefined blocks of code, was a lot like building with LEGO.

The observation turned into insight for LEGO. The company, says Smith- Meyer, had fallen into the trap of thinking that play habits had changed, and that LEGO must change with them. Not at all. Kids just wanted freedom to experiment on their own with the plastic bricks and to build something masterful. Or as Smith-Meyer puts it, "LEGO takes time.

The boys just wanted to light the oven, but they ended up burning down the whole business and the family home. The children were saved, but the Ole Kirk Kristiansen's future looked bleak. Ole Kirk was a religious man; his optimism and sense of humour were well-known far beyond the local boundaries. Where others would have folded their hands in their laps and accepted their fate, he did not give up. With the courage born of desperation, he rebuilt his business on a larger and more expensive scale than it had been previously - and more so than he could afford: Many rooms had to be sublet, and the Kristiansens themselves only used a small part of the building. Apprentices were no longer paid, but received board and lodging instead. Life continued, somehow.