The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities.

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

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.

Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.