The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so..

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically..

New ideas must use old buildings.

New ideas often need old buildings..

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities..

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice..

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for….

Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes..

Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial..

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things..

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently fl….

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downt….

The entrepreneurial investors of the time just want to repeat themselves indefinitely and don't know when to stop. You can't do that. And so finally ….

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong..

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate..

The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say..

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work but only the kind of quick, easy outer impression that t….

But look what we have built ... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities..

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow..

To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a d….

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely differ….