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

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better.

Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.

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.