Xerox Quotes

Even Proust - there's a famous passage where Odette opens the door with a cold, she's sulky, her hair is loose and undone, her skin is patchy, and Swann, who has never cared about her until that moment, falls in love with her because she looks like a Botticelli girl from a slightly damaged fresco. Which Proust himself only knew from a reproduction. He never saw the original, in the Sistine Chapel. But even so - the whole novel is in some ways about that moment. And the damage is part of the attraction, the painting's blotchy cheeks. Even through a copy Proust was able to re-dream that image, re-shape reality with it, pull something all his own from it into the world. Because - the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times. ~ Donna Tartt

Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Dr. Johnson's enticing images and language give us a fundamentally sound and memorable way of managing change." - Albert J. Simone, President ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY "Spencer Johnson's unique insights and storytelling make this a rare book that can be read and understood quickly by everyone who wants to do well in these changing times." - Randy Harris, Former Vice-Chairman MERRILL LYNCH INTERNATIONAL "This book is a simple, understandable road map for us to use as we deal with our own individual circumstances around change." - Michael Morley, Senior Vice President EASTMAN KODAK "This wonderful book is an asset to any person or group that applies its lessons." - John A. Lopiano, Senior V.P. XEROX CORPORATION ~ Spencer Johnson

Crankiness is a human attribute that, when people walk in the door of Xerox, they remain human. The best way to get the best out of people is to not force them to be something other than they naturally are. Now what do they have to be? They have to be respectful. You can't be ridiculously disrespectful. ~ Ursula Burns

Xerox did OK in moving to digital in the commercial space. They didn't do well in the consumer market, but they're not a consumer brand. They don't even know how to spell consumer. ~ Antonio Perez

Xerox manages the infrastructure of E-ZPass for a large number of states. So when you say E-ZPass, and get some bill from E-ZPass, or call and ask a question about E-ZPass, you're talking to a Xerox person. ~ Ursula Burns

No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory - a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story. ~ Joseph O'Neill

Comin' from the school of hard knocks,
Some perpetrate ... they drink Clorox.
Attack the black, cause I know they lack exact
The cold facts, and still they try to Xerox. ~ Chuck D

DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

Time would heal the wound that was Frank; the world would continue to spin, to wobble, its axis only slightly skewed, momentarily displaced, by the brief, shuddering existence of one man -one THING - a post-human mutant, a blurred Xerox copy of a human being, the offspring of the waste of technology, the bent shadow of a fallen angel; Frank was all of these things. . . he was the sum of everything dark and sticky, the congealment of all things wrong and dark and foul in this world and every other seedy rathole world in every back-alley universe throughout the vast garbage dump of creation; God rolled the dice and Frank lost. . . he was a spiritual flunkie, a universal pain-in-the-ass, a joy-riding, soul-sucking cosmic punk rolling through time and space and piling up a karmic debt of such immense magnitude so as to invariably glue the particular vehicle of the immediate moment to the basement of possibility - planet earth - and force Frank to RE-ENLIST, endlessly, to return, over and over, to a flawed world somewhere to spend the Warhol-film-loop nights of eternity serving concurrent life sentences roaming the dimly lit hallways of always, stuck in the dense overshoes of physicality, forever, until finally - one would hope there is always a FINALLY - eventually, anyway - God would step in and say ENOUGH ALREADY and grab Frank by the collar of one of his thrift-shop polyester flower-print shirts and hurl him out the back door of the cosmos, expelling the rotten orb into the gr ~ George Mangels

His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist. ~ Norman Mailer

This old notion that work is drudgery is nonsense. Most days, even back when Xerox was under siege, I could not wait to get to the office. ~ Ursula Burns

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became ~ Bill Bryson

No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office to even
register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her brain.
Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer my carpet
on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks with
lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures. ~ Neal Stephenson

Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright. ~ Steve Wozniak

You were never to say you weren't "fine, thank you - and yourself?" You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, "If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists. ~ Lorrie Moore

The most important lesson we'd ever learn in life is that everyone is different and if we accept this for a fact and let them be, they can surprise us with what they can do and achieve.
If others thought like us, acted like us and behaved like us, we'd all be xerox copies of each other and the monumental success we've achieved as a race (human race) would never have been possible. ~ Rupali Rajopadhye Rotti

Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ...
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive break ~ Hakim Bey

My father works for Xerox and fixes those gigantic copy machines that are about 10 feet wide. ~ Michael Cera

By the time I stepped down as Xerox's CEO in 2009 - and as chairman in January 2010 - Xerox had become the vibrant, profitable and revitalized company that it still is today. What made the difference was a strong turnaround plan, dedicated people and a firm commitment from company leaders. ~ Anne M. Mulcahy

I don't want to be like Shakespeare; I want to be like Saurabh Sharma, and I don't want other people to become my xerox copies. Be Thyself! ~ Saurabh Sharma

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died. ~ Andrew Young

The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,
videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It
can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster.
He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library of
Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear
on what the word "congress" means.
And even the word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of
books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and
magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable
form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the
material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library
became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no
substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central
Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was
falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering. ~ Neal Stephenson

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a lef- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.

But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald's and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald's is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. "No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.

The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. ~ Neal Stephenson

Entire families work for Xerox. ~ Anne M. Mulcahy

The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber. ~ Charles Platt

The rest of August passes with Xerox monotony, each day a photocopy of the one before as I wait until my first gig. The only thing I'm learning working for the Agent of Evil is that bitterness is a contagious disease, a virus spread by aural contact. I try to remain immune by embracing my alter ego, telling myself that it's not Edward Zanni who has to deliver a cup of Irving's pee to his urologist on a sweltering subway; it's Alan, Lucifer's piss boy.

It doesn't work. ~ Marc Acito

I'm telling you that at eight she knew more about reproduction than Xerox. ~ Joan Rivers

When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay knew that Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology, so he suggested they go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas's film studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin County to the edge of Lucas's Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his little computer division were based. "I was blown away, and I came back and tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple," Jobs recalled. "But the folks running Apple weren't interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway. ~ Walter Isaacson

I worked for Xerox for 4 years and after that I knew I was never going to be a corporate person. It wasn't my environment. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days. ~ Joshua Ferris

I thought administration was the running of the office. The Xerox machine. Paying bills. ~ Lesley Stahl

Lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in. It's change you can Xerox. ~ Hillary Clinton

The big guys who ran things didn't want you thinking or feeling. It slowed down production. They wanted you scared and working so you wouldn't bump up against the truth
life could be fun. Yup, they wanted you scared. They wanted you grim. They wanted you madly cranking out Barbie dolls or Post Toasties or Xerox, or they wanted you overworked and underpaid at teaching so you could at least feel smart, and they wanted you to keep having kids so you'd have to keep working at whatever job you were stuck in and not have time to think or feel or, if you did, you certainly wouldn't have time to do anything about it, or even get close to the big fun, the fun that belonged only to them. And then they wanted your kids to hop on the same treadmill. ~ Bill Ripley

There's one black-and-white who stands out because he's taller than the rest.
The Street protocol states that your avatar can't be any taller than you are.
This is to prevent people from walking around a mile high. Besides, if this
guy's using a pay terminal -- which he must be, to judge from the image quality
-- it can't jazz up his avatar. It just shows him the way he is, except not as
well. Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person
who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button,
while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and
looking at them. ~ Neal Stephenson

When I became CEO of Xerox 10 years ago, the company's situation was dire. Debt was mounting, the stock sinking and bankers were calling. People urged me to declare bankruptcy, but I felt personally responsible for tens of thousands of employees. ~ Anne M. Mulcahy

If you go to Norway, Finland, Russia or Australia, you'll see Xerox or Fuji-Xerox people, not just the name on the door. We have human beings who live and work and serve customers everywhere around the globe. ~ Ursula Burns

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program. ~ Alan Kay

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment." If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn't get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked - until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones - until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. "Well, you can say, 'Everybody knows that,'" said Munger. "I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." Munger's ~ Michael Lewis

Sustainable development is a proven catalyst for Xerox innovation. ~ Anne M. Mulcahy

She wears high tech Devo suit, she changed her name to Xerox, she hides quaaludes in her boots. ~ Alice Cooper

Xerox is really good at managing documents, and we're definitely good at managing through a process. ~ Ursula Burns

XEROX AND WURLITZER HAVE ANNOUNCED THEY
WILL MERGE TO MARKET REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS ~ Linda Howard

Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it. ~ Walter Isaacson