I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.

Some of the large [municipalities] in Quebec can contain within them most of the answers to their own practical problems. And so lots of different possibilities for doing things in a practical and different way become available.

[ 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.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement.

[If Quebec became sovereign] there would be one level of government that would be missing, one less level of government. The municipality would become the second level.

I think that part of the growing popularity of the New Urbanism is not simply because it is so rational, and not simply because people care so much about community or even understand it, or the relation of sprawl to the ruination of the natural world. But they just don't like what is around. And they will be ruthless with it.