Happiness, I think, lies on the surface... when one plunges under the surface all the buoyant things disappear, and the farther down one gets the more cold and dark it seems: and the more oppressive space feels.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

Organic planning does not begin with a preconceived goal; it moves from need to need, from opportunity to opportunity, in a series of adaptations that themselves become increasingly coherent and purposeful, so that they generate a complex final design, hardly less unified than a pre-formed geometric pattern.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.