William J. Brennan Jr. Quotes

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

I grew up in a small town that was absolutely a perfect embodiment of new urbanism.

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city.

I think it's evident that expensive neighborhoods in Seattle are surrounded by natural beauty. That elevates city life. So if we can make cities more attractive in the long run, we can be smarter about issues like development, zoning and economics.

In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way.

Public officers are the servants and agents of the people, to execute the laws which the people have made.

I know some say, let us have good laws, and no matter for the men that execute them: but let them consider, that though good laws do well, good men do better: for good laws may want good men, and be abolished or evaded by ill mend but good men will never want good laws, nor suffer ill ones.

I'm honored to have the support of Attorney General Bondi. She has been a champion for constitutionally limited government in Florida and across the nation. Our state is fortunate to have a leader so dedicated to the rule of law.

There are other places at which ... the laws have said there shall be towns; but Nature has said there shall not, and they remain unworthy of enumeration.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

We are producing urban places which are disjointed and disconnected and not worthy of our civilisation

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

The power that keeps cities of men together Is noble preservation of law.

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

My business is that of every other good citizen - to uphold the law.

We have the means to change the laws we find unjust or onerous. We cannot, as citizens, pick and choose the laws we will or will not obey.

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities.

Remember the attorney general is not a member of the president's staff. He's the attorney general of the United States. He's there to represent all of us, and it means all the laws have to be enforced fairly. And you can't bring your individual prejudices in there.