“Fundamentally, sustainable development is a notion of discipline. It means humanity must ensure that meeting present needs does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.“
Gro Harlem Brundtland

The architect must be a prophet... a prophet in the true sense of the term... if he can't see at least ten years ahead don't call him an architect.
Frank Lloyd Wright

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
William Blake

"Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator"
"Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face"
Juvenal (ca. 50 - 130 AD)

"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next to find ourselves."
George Santyana, The Philosophy of Travel

"There are also, in every civilization, real places which are something like counter-sites. I shall call them heterotopias.""....."The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites, that are in themselves incompatible."....."The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."
Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967)

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work
Stephen King

Action is the foundational key to all success.
Pablo Picasso

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
Henry David Thoreau

“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.”
Lily Tomlin

“Know how to choose. Most things in life depend on it. You need good taste and an upright judgement; intelligence and application are not enough. There is no perfection without discernment and selection.”
Baltasar Gracian

“You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease and mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”
Pablo Picasso

"You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing the small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.”
Alvin Toffler

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.
The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
Leonardo da Vinci

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.
Andy Warhol

“Future generation is the most important thing”
Confucius

“treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children”
Kenyan Proverb

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced"
Kierkegaard

“sustainable development is a dynamic process which enables all people to realise their potential, and to improve their quality of life, in ways which simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth's life support systems.”
(Forum for the Future Annual Report 2000).

“Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further developments.”
Lewis Mumford

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. ”
Albert Einstein

There are two posible routes to affluence. Either produce much, or desire little.
Anon.

if everyone on the world enjoyed the same level of natural resource consumption as a typical UK citizen, we would need three planets to support us. This is clearly unsustainable.
www.bioregional.com

"Uncommon men require no common trust; give him but scope and he will set the bounds"
Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

Commodities, including parcels of time, only accrue value if and when they are rendered scarce. Time scarcity has been a basic principle of industrial life.
Andrew Ross


The wise man doesn’t give the right answers - he poses the right questions
Claude Levi Strauss

Enchantment, a useless thing, but as inidispensible as bread. There are two reasons for good architecture in a hospital, school or public space. One is its effect on outcomes: patients get well faster, exam results improve, crime rates drop. The other is its value in itself, like the value of music and art. A patient, a child and a citizen are entitled to beauty dignity and richness in their surroundings.
Gio Ponti

A 17th-century painting can be “modern” because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A “modern” painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.
Mayra Mannes

The invention of printing radically changed ways of thinking - not just how things are communicated, but what can be thought
Derrick de Kerckhove

Do not fear mistakes. There are none.
Miles Davis

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
John Cage

He who would travel happily must travel lightly.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I call architecture “petrified music.” Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.
Goethe

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
Johan Sebastian Bach

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Jacques Barzun

The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on.
Kevin Kelly

Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.
Elias Canetti

lums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
Cyril Connolly

Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper wil turn a chair into a table.
Alan Cooper

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.
Henry Miller

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.
Mario Andretti

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.
Henry Miller

Begin the next.
Slogan on cement truck in Tokyo

In 1994, 120 million people migrated legally, or illegally, from one country to another. That's two per cent of them world's population.
International Organization for Migration

Scenic games will be responsible for the death of the soul.
Saint Augustine

An ox is still an ox, even if you drive it to Vienna.
Hungarian proverb

Do less, with less.
Viridian Design Manifesto

Some people say complexity is 'out of control'. But not knowing how to reach a destination is one thing — having no destination at all is another, more wretched, thing.
John Thackara

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.
Marshall Mc Luhan

We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
Lewis Mumford

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

Don’t follow trends - start trends.
Frank Capra

Through play, the child is liberated from action, from the constrants of the real, and moves in the direction of abstract thought.
Tony Graham

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.
Albert Camus

In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.
Victor Papanek

My despondency index indexes the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the suicide rate at the Golden Gate Bridge, and gives you a moving average of what's going on.
Natalie Jeremijenko

Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s further developments.
Lewis Mumford

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
Henry Miller

A wise man changes his mind; a fool never will.
Spanish Proverb

If you want to build a ship, teach the men to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Saint Exupery

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society”
Mark Twain

"The brute covers himself, the rich man and the fop adorn themselves, the elegant man dresses!"
Honore de Balzac

You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled. - Tahanie

Little flower, but if I could understand, what you are, root and all in all, I should know what God and man is. - Tennyson

We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin. - Leif Johansson

We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us. - E.F. Schumacher

Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'. - Luther Standing Bear

If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed. - Chinese Proverb

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years. - Jacques Cousteau

Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food. - Hippocrates

If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wastefull. A far better way would be to avail ourselves of the sun's rays. - Nikola Tesla

We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial. - Ted Turner

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew. - Marshall McLuhan

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking. - Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The continued poverty of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants and excessive consumption by the minority are the two major causes of environmental degradation. - UN Environment Program

A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent. - E. F. Schumacher

Everyone who considers themselves a realist will be forced to justify their behavior in light of their contribution toward the preservation of the environment. - Ernst von Weizacker

For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful. - Buckminster Fuller

The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring and thus more intelligent, even competitive. - Paul Hawken

We have forgotten who we are, we have lost our sense of wonder and connectedness, we have degraded the earth and our fellow creatures, and we have nowhere else to go . . . - Earth Charter

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait 'til oil and coal run out before we tackle that. - Thomas Edison

The boundless blue-sky, the ocean which gives us breath and protects us from the endless black and death, is but an infinitesimally thin film. - Vladimir Shatalov - Cosmonaut

The only people in the suburbs who like what's happening are the developers, who are getting rich. - Myron Orfield

Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment. - Rene Dubos

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. - Carl Sagan

That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted. - Egyptian tomb inscription

If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror. - John Young, former Apollo astronaut

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them - Albert Einstein

Human history becomes more a race between education and catastrophe. - H. G. Wells

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. - Frank Lloyd Wright

The time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men. - Leonardo Da Vinci

Our world has enough for each person's need, but not for his greed. - Mahatma Gandhi

We all moan and groan about the loss of the quality of life through the destruction of our ecology, and yet each one of us, in our own little comfortable ways, contributes daily to that destruction. It's time now to awaken in each one of us the respect and attention our beloved mother deserves. - Ed Asner

The world's deteriorating ecology poses as great a danger to mankind today as did the nuclear standoff between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War. - Mikhail Gorbachev

Out of clutter ... find simplicity. From discord . . . find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. - Albert Einstein

Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the people of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. - Chief Seattle

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.- Stewart Udall

We are each as much a part of the environment as a tree is. The ecosphere is an interconnected web (like the Internet).- Matt Howes

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge. - Thomas Edison