35 Quotes

“A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world -- is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love -- passion -- liberty.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past ad the already dead future.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“There was good in seahorses, in yellow dwarfs of destiny, but they are in no way adapted to the requirements of modern life.

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)”
― Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City: A Reader

“If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Marrying before 35 should be considered as child marriage.”
― Nitya Prakash

“While I formally became disabled at age 45, with the benefit of hindsight I should have registered as disabled at age 35.”
― Steven Magee

“Sighing, Sophie turns back to me. "So Everett's—"

"A boy's name, yeah." My flush deepens, my usual embarrassment quadrupled. I don't want to keep talking over Boy Wonder and annoying him. "My parents didn't realize it was." To which most respond, "How could they not?"

Boy Wonder glances at me. "Guess Everetts sounds like Bernadette or Juliette. Easy mistake."

I'm surprised. He understood. Sometimes things that show be straightforward—like what's a boy's versus girl's name, or why your entire self-worth isn't at stake when you let down your parents—just aren't. If you didn't grow up like I did.”
― Abigail Hing Wen, Loveboat, Taipei