“I do not think the measure of a civilization is how tall its buildings are, but rather how well its people have learned to relate to their environment and fellow man.”
~ Sun Bear of the Chippewa
“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
~ Rebecca Solnit
“When tall buildings and traffic lanes and business districts become our priority, we forget about people in neighborhoods. We actually forget about what is the Life Blood of a city. One of the things we ended up doing by focusing on the urban form – by building taller, bigger, faster, better – is that by the 1960’s cities were in financial crisis. They were in financial crisis because they neglected the neighborhoods.”
~ Craig Steven Wilder
“The elite will label us the enemy. They will condemn the rebel as impractical. They will argue that we must accept and work within the current systems of power. But the rebel is not concerned with self promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that hope has two beautiful daughters; Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and the Courage to change them.”
~ OBEY
“When things are exquisitely beautiful and rare, they shouldn’t be privately owned.”
~ Kshama Sawant
“Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces. Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it. Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far. But each and every day people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rainforests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rainforests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rainforests of Amazonia and redwoods of California had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those loggers limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that they were committing but we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans.”
~ Paul Watson
“In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than public suffering.”
~ Voltaire
“Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.”
~ Karl Marx
“Detroit, which was once the symbol of miracles of industrialization and then became the symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization, is now the symbol of a new kind of society, of people who grow their own food, of people who try and help each other, to how we begin to think, not so much of getting jobs and advancing our own fortunes, but how we depend on each other. I mean, it’s another world that we’re creating here in Detroit. And we had to. I mean, we didn’t do so because we are better people than anybody else, but when you look out and all you see is vacant lots, when all you see is devastation, when all you see — do you look at it as a curse, or do you look at it as a possibility, as having potential? And we here in Detroit had to begin doing that for our own humanity.”
~ Grace Lee Boggs
“We occupy everything because everything is ours. We demand nothing because they have nothing to give us.”
~ Anon.
“A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.”
~ Epicurus
“We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.”
~ Arnold Toynbee
“The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century – or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.”
~ Laini Taylor
“Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.”
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
“Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.”
~ Edward Abbey
“In this dependence on maps as some sort of higher reality, project planners and urban designers assume they can create a promenade simply by mapping one in where they want it, then having it built. But a promenade needs promenaders.”
~ Jane Jacobs
“A city isn’t so unlike a person. They both have the marks to show they have many stories to tell. They see many faces. They tear things down and make new again.”
~ Rasmenia Massoud
“But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”
~ John Updike