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"Cities must be fun."
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"New Rule: Stop leaving couches on the sidewalk. Besides being lazy and ugly, it's animal cruelty. You teach your dog not to pee on the couch, and then when you take him to the place he's supposed to pee, there's a couch."
"Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure."
"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand."
"A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one."
"She thought of the city at night, of cities at night. Discarded constellations of old stars, fallen from the sky, rearranged on Earth in patterns and pathways and towers. Invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright."
"I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years."
"Any plan of administration which contemplates a concentrating of responsibility is open to the dangers which follow the creation of a bureaucracy."
"Being in New York is an almost overwhelming experience. While Washington, D.C., is my favorite American city, I regard New York City as the most amazing city in the world. No other comes close. It is an incredible, inexhaustible engine."
"Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents."
"Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy."
Explore more quotes by James Rouse
"Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business. The legitimate purpose of business is to provide a product or service that people need and do it so well that it's profitable."
"Why isn't it natural for people who have lived and worked at something to want to use the knowledge and capacity in a new way, free from the burden of making a living?"
"Visions describe what best should be, could be - if and when mankind has the will to make them real."
"For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind."
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