A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.

You cannot save the land apart from the people, or the people apart from the land.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?