"Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
Henry David Thoreau (or William Morris?)

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"...about four-fifths of the contents of nearly every home could be given away with good effect to that home. But the things given away might go on to poison some other home. So why not at once destroy undesireable things .. make and end of them?"
--Frank Lloyd Wright, "Prairie Architecture", Modern Architecture, 1931.

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"This prying among the personal residue of a finished life was a part of his job which Dalgliesh had always found a little distasteful. It was too much like putting the dead at a disadvantage. During his career he had examined with interest and with pity so many petty leavings. The soiled underclothes pushed hurriedly into drawers, personal letters which prudence would have destroyed, half-eaten meals, unpaid bills, old photographs, pictures and books which the dead would not have chosen to represent their taste to a curious or vulgar world, family secrets, stale make-up in greasy jars, the muddle of ill-disciplined or unhappy lives. It was no longer the fashion to dread an unshriven end but most people, if they thought at all, hoped for time to clear away their debris. He remembered from childhood the voice of an old aunt exhorting him to change his vest.(singlet) `Suppose you got run over, Adam. What would people think?' The question was less absurd than it had seemed to a ten-year-old. Time had taught him that it expressed one of the major preoccupations of mankind, the dread of losing face."
-- P.D. James - A Mind to Murder

See also: Organization Quotes (pdf file) Version 1.1, 133K

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