When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.

There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

New ideas must use old buildings