[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.

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 the housing boom, or the auto boom, or whatever it is that's been carrying things along, runs out of customers.

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

Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

New ideas often need old buildings.