State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.

A philosophy that begins in doubt assails what no-one believes, and invites us to nothing believable

Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.

Were we to aim in every case at the kind of supreme beauty exemplified by Sta Maria della Salute, we should end with aesthetic overload. The clamorous masterpieces, jostling for attention side by side, would lose their distinctiveness, and the beauty of each of them would be at war with the beauty of the rest.

It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.

The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification