*quotables
Some other folks who knew how to put a sentence together:
George Bernard Shaw:.
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. (1903)
Lewis Mumford:
Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community deserves.
— Sticks and Stones, 1924
Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
— The Culture of Cities, 1938
Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
— 1979
The right to access every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone owns such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.
— 1961
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.
–1961
Jane Jacobs:
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent state of rehabilitation — although these make fine ingredients — but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings….
Even the enterprises that can support new construction in cities need old construction in their immediate vicinity. Otherwise they are part of a total attraction and total environment that is economically too limited — and therefore functionally too limited to be lively, interesting and convenient. Flourishing diversity anywhere in a city means the mingling of high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield and no-yield enterprises.â€
Yogi Berra:
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
James Howard Kunstler:
Efficiency is the straightest path to hell.
(From The Long Emergency, …exactly why a Wal-Mart economy will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national agglomeration of diverse independent small-town economies.)
(Many of the above were taken from this awesome collection of urban design quotes.)