One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.

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

Maybe part of my animus against the English is the way they have always treated the Irish and they way they still think about the Irish.

[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.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.