Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Motion is a great tranquilizer.
Anything goes and nothing matters.
Ridicule is the unfortunate destiny of the ridiculous.
Societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
I believe most of suburbia is unreformable and will not be fixed.
The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.
Forget [Le Corbusier ]. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow.
America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.
Our twenty-first century economy may focus on agriculture, not information.
It pays to remember that societies get what they deserve, not what they expect.
Suburbia is the insidious cartoon of the country house in a cartoon of the country.
I don't like talking about 'solutions.' I prefer talking about intelligent responses.
Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.
The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.
The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.
At the heart of our misunderstanding and infantile behavior is the wish for a miracle cure.
The industrial age is over. What follows will be life lived on a much smaller and finer scale.
I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend.
Two decades from now, I doubt that the home building industry, so called, will even exist as we have known it.
American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They're over-scaled.
For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.
A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a time out from technological progress as we know it.
The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.
I'm serenely convinced that we are heading into what will amount to a 'time out' from technological progress as we know it.
It is worth remembering that our cities occupy important sites, and therefore some kind of settlement is liable to be there.
We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes.
I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.
When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.
The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.
The living arrangements American now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually.
We will have to make new arrangements, or revive bygone ones. We may, for another example, see the return of the boarding house.
I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we're running, the way we're running it.
Once energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.
In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands.
I'm very optimistic about the future. I'm just not optimistic about the skyscraper as a building typology that is suited for the future.
The task we face is reorganizing the systems we depend on for daily life in a way that is consistent with the realities coming down at us.
Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.
The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live.
The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things
History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!
My skills are not of the highest caliber, but I know a thing or two, and I occasionally produce a painting that contains passages of truth and beauty.
The human race needs a time out from all this techno-magic-mischief, a period to reflect on what we've done and how we ought to behave with this stuff.
The sentimental view of anything is apt to be ridiculous, but I feel that I have been unusually sensitive to the issue of place since I was a little boy.
The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal.
I believe our techno-zealotry will be moderated by sheer circumstance. We will do what reality compels us to do, not necessarily what our fantasies propose.
In our current frame of mind, or paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, we like to think that marshalling government policy is the way to get things done.
We have to grow our food differently because industrial farming will soon end. That means growing more food locally on smaller farms with more human attention.