Nordic Design Quotes

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary

To summarise, the design of Nordic tax systems has over time created a ‘fiscal illusion’, whereby the public is not aware of the taxes they are paying. One can reflect on whether it is really in line with democratic principles to raise taxes in a way such that citizens are unaware of them. Interestingly, few proponents of introducing a Nordic model of high taxes in other countries stress that such a move would require hiding the true cost of taxation from the public.

concerned an exercise machine called the Alpine Ski, a magnificently designed device that simulates downhill skiing, giving the user not only the aerobic benefits you get from something like the NordicTrack, but at the same time, a serious muscular workout. The Alpine Ski’s inventor, Herb Schell, was my client. A former personal trainer in Hollywood, he had made a bundle with this invention. Then suddenly, about a year ago, cheaply produced ads began to run on late-night television for something called the Scandinavian Skier, unmistakably a knockoff of Herb’s invention. It was a lot less expensive, too: whereas the real Alpine Ski sells for upward of six hundred dollars (and Alpine Ski Gold for over a thousand), the Scandinavian Skier was going for $129.99. Herb Schell was already seated in my office, along with the president and chief executive officer of E-Z Fit, the company that was manufacturing Scandinavian Skier, Arthur Sommer; and his attorney, a high-powered lawyer named Stephen Lyons, whom I’d heard of but never met. On some level I found it ironic that both Herb Schell and Arthur Sommer were paunchy and visibly in lousy shape. Herb had confided to me over lunch shortly after we met that, now that he was no longer a personal trainer, he’d grown tired of working out all the time; he much preferred liposuction.

concerned an exercise machine called the Alpine Ski, a magnificently designed device that simulates downhill skiing, giving the user not only the aerobic benefits you get from something like the NordicTrack, but at the same time, a serious muscular workout. The Alpine Ski’s inventor, Herb Schell, was my client. A former personal trainer in Hollywood, he had made a bundle with this invention. Then suddenly, about a year ago, cheaply produced ads began to run on late-night television for something called the Scandinavian Skier, unmistakably a knockoff of Herb’s invention. It was a lot less expensive, too: whereas the real Alpine Ski sells for upward of six hundred dollars (and Alpine Ski Gold for over a thousand), the Scandinavian Skier was going for $129.99.

Lockheed, who used our drawings and specifications to build the C-5A that is still the backbone of the U.S.’s heavy lift air transports system. In 1955, Douglas began a furious design program to build a large commercial jet transport. It

German A9 and A10 long range missiles. We designed a ballistic missile and mobile launch system, the

resigned Douglas and became President of the new Lockheed Missile Division, where he designed and developed the U.S. Navy’s UGM-278/c Polaris and UGM-73A Poseidon missiles, which were launched from large submerged submarines like the U.S.S. Alaska Class. Many years later, as Oregon State Vice President of the Navy League of the United States, I arranged

design for the Saturn S-IVB Stage

The entire WS-315A program was deployed, in England and Italy, in large numbers during the Cold War. What is most interesting is that two weeks after we won the Air Force contract to design for the DM-18 against the Army’s Missile Development Center at Huntsville, Alabama (headed by Dr. Von Braun, the senior concept designer of the German V2 missile) we also won the contract to build the whole system to deploy

IT IS IMPORTANT to recognize that the term “Aryan” did not mean in the mid-nineteenth century what it means to us today. It had nothing to do with Teutons or fair-haired Nordic types but referred first and foremost to a group of Sanskrit-speaking herders and horsemen who are thought to have migrated from the Iranian Plateau into what is now northern India in the second millennium B.C. These people, who referred to themselves using the Sanskrit word ārya (meaning “noble”) were known to nineteenth-century Europeans as “Indo-Aryans,” or just plain “Aryans.” At the time, Sanskrit was the oldest known language in the Indo-European family (older languages have since been discovered), and the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were presumed to be the people from whom all the other Indo-Europeans—Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and so on—had sprung. Thus, “Aryan,” originally a fairly narrow designation of a particular Indic tribe, became synonymous in the nineteenth century with “the mother of modern civilization.