The world is super-stupid. You have by far the best designers in America! And you do the most stupid cars in the world! They put billions into their stupid designs for General Motors, Chrysler, Buick, or who knows what. The designers in America must be frustrated. I am not frustrated, because I am not a designer - I am a philosopher, and all philosophers have said for ages that the world around them is stupid.

I'm a very peaceful man. In the '80s, I was the chief designer at Thyssen, one of the biggest companies in Germany. But when they asked me to design armored vehicles, tanks, and submarines, I quit overnight.

I was 3 years old, and we had a very rich neighbor in Berlin who drove a Mercedes sports car. I remember standing behind this car, admiring the trunk, how nicely shaped it was, for an hour. That shape has never left me - I could design it today!

It took two years of me telling Canon engineers that a camera is a thing between the human hand and the human eye, so it had to have ergonomics on both sides! They got the message, and we did it, and overnight it was the camera of the world. Everyone - Nikon, Yashica, Sony - all copied Colani.

The world is super-stupid. You have by far the best designers in America! And you do the most stupid cars in the world! They put billions into their stupid designs for General Motors, Chrysler, Buick, or who knows what. The designers in America must be frustrated. I am not frustrated, because I am not a designer - I am a philosopher, and all philosophers have said for ages that the world around them is stupid.

You see, if you are 30 years ahead of your time, you will always have difficulty speaking with the bosses in the industry. They are too conservative.

If I had been president, I would have come out and declared: "Nothing there, ever! This place stays as it is. We make a big place there where people can pray about the errors we have made that those two towers had to fall."