Eszter Kissová

“Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.”

“What kind of competition is there in your body? Suppose your brain said ' I'm the most important organ, and the liver said 'I am, and I want to go in a free enterprise-system.' You would rot away in a month, if every organ of your body, were out for itself.”

“The government means industry, if you know what I mean.”

“Our society cannot be maintained by this type of incompetency.”

“Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.”

“And you can't find "love" because in order to find "love" you have to be capable of dishing it out. In order to be capable of giving "love", your own life has to be in harmony with everything else, and that's not attainable…”

“All people are brought up by cultures and every culture says 'You live in the greatest country in the world' 'I'm American and proud of it', 'I'm Canadian. I'm proud of it' That separates people. Now, if you were brought up in Ireland, you'd say, 'The Irish people are fine, there's a fine Irish lad sitting there'. Well, even your dialect, your facial expressions, you pick up from your country or the area you come from. If you still don't understand that, if you were brought up in Australia, you'd say, 'How are ya, Mate? Yeah Yeah Yeah'. That's normal in Australia. If a Filipino baby was brought up in Australia, that's the way it speaks.”

“We're running into a lot of new problems today because of what we emphasize in this culture. The word 'success' to the average person means earning a lot of money and having a home, two cars, children in college. Success to me is entirely different to what success is to the average person. Success is being a successful human being in terms of pursuing what you believe in. If you believe in making paintings, writing poetry, writing music. If this is what you really want, you're successful to yourself. But to be successful to your culture means to sell yourself short of what you really want.”

“We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.”

“You know that you can't go out there and change the world tomorrow morning. It just takes time, and the realization of that does not produce frustration. What produces frustration, is when you expect the world to join with your cause it's so reasonable. It is not reasonable to unreasonable people.”

“What I am after is the first impression - I want to show all one sees on first entering the room - what my eye takes in at first glance.”

“One always talks of surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture.”

“It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.”

“How many days have I spent alone with my cat… and when I say alone, I mean without a material being, for my cat is a mystical companion, a spirit.”

“It's not a matter of painting life, it's a matter of giving life to painting.”

“The principal subject is the surface, which has its color, its laws over and above those of object.”

“Color does not add a pleasant quality to design - it reinforces it.”

“The painter's only solid ground is the palette and colors, but as soon as the colors achieve an illusion, they are no longer judged.”

“You reason colour more than you reason drawing Colour has a logic as severe as form.”