At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.

Neri Oxman

Our femtosecond snapshots can examine a molecule at discrete instants in time.

Ahmed Zewail

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

Alex Steffen

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.

Alfred Kinsey

Recovery is an ongoing project that is really discrete from everything else in my life. It allows me to be an agent, allows me to write, allows me to be married, allows me to be part of a family. The writing is not a support beam of recovery but a happy consequence of it.

Bill Clegg

The military is a discrete entity. Then they come back, and they're such a small percentage of the population, and they can't really - it's hard for them to talk to civilians.

Bill Pullman

The three discrete invariances - reflection invariance, charge conjugation invariance, and time reversal invariance - are connected by an important theorem called the CPT theorem.

Chen-Ning Yang

The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.

Chen-Ning Yang

In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions.

Daniel H. Pink

Assurance, action, and evidence influence each other in an ongoing process. This helix is like a coil, and as it spirals upward it expands and widens. These three elements of faith - assurance, action, and evidence - are not separate and discrete; rather, they are interrelated and continuous and cycle upward.

David A. Bednar

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.

Deborah Eisenberg

Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.

Douglas Rushkoff

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

George Oppen

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

Johannes Stark

Innocence could be considered a discrete state of mind.

John Shirley

Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.

Julian Baggini

Is a family just the strict definition of a small and discrete unit, or is it about the larger organic group that inevitably grows up around the smaller one?

Kara Swisher

What's interesting about the 21st century is how people deal with cultural history. We don't necessarily feel like there are discrete categories. We consume it as a complete package, whether it's down the street or on the other side of the globe.

Kehinde Wiley

Old money in Southeast Asia is much more discrete and low key. It's about not wearing brand names. It's about being invisible, almost. The billionaire can be taking the bus with you.

Kevin Kwan

If you can relate to what another person is going through while giving their experience room to be its own discrete thing, you're probably a crackerjack emergency contact.

Mary H.K. Choi

Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.

Mary H.K. Choi