It is all too common to so see misattributed quotes everywhere on the internet. Case in point: In this reddit post here, a quote from popular sitcom, the Office, is attributed to John Wilkes Booth, an assassin of Abraham Lincoln.
I started thinking about creating some posters with quotes and put them up in real places. The first one was to put a picture of famous physicist and science communicator, Richard Feynman with a situationist protest slogan:
Let’s be realistic, do the impossible
To be honest, it was more radical to be put in the office setting. Original quote was:
Be realistic: demand the impossible! Under the cobbles, the beach! It is forbidden to forbid!
I replaced the “demand” with “do”.
Here are the more examples such misplaced quotes:
Incredible picture of Rosalind Franklin with a microscope. Franklin’s famous Photo 51 led to the discovery of double helix structure of the DNA. I have combined her microscope picture with quote from Burkinabè leader Thomas Sankara’s speech.
You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain kind of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. Besides, it took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen.
I could take the similar approach to create a poster without a person. I put an image of a pear next to a command for “Eat the pear”. This comes from a Chinese saying about theory of knowledge:
Whoever wants to know a thing has no way of doing so except by coming into contact with it, that is, by living (practicing) in its environment. … If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself…. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.
Another poster, in similar manner, is to put a random question next to a great Herman Melville character Bartleby’s
I would prefer not to..
Another variation of this project was to put a quote next to logo. I chose to match Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s UN speech to “Food not bombs” collectives. Castro said,
“The rumble of weapons, menacing language, marking arrogance on the international scene, must cease. Enough already with the dream that the world’s problems can be resolved with nuclear weapons. Bombs may kill the starving, the ill and the ignorant, but they cannot kill hunger, disease or ignorance.”
