The digital corkboard

Favorite quotes on planning, and life in general:

The public spirit shown in this enterprise [the Plan of Chicago, 1909] has been remarkable, and distinctly shows that it is only necessary to call upon the civic pride of our people to get an instant and most hearty response in the direction of the public good.
Daniel H. Burnham

"Would you tell me which way I ought to go from here?" asked Alice.
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get," said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin

Amateurs accustomed to emulation made great places. It is the professionals of recent decades that have ruined our cities with their inventions.
Andres Duany

"Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the pages of the catalog and began to cry stormily.  'They're such beautiful applied ornamentation,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the corbels and capitals.  'It makes me sad because I've never seen such - beautiful applied ornamentation before..."
Larry Welzen (2009), as derived from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
Benjamin Franklin

A hundred years after we are gone and forgotten, those who never heard of us will be living with the results of our actions.
Oliver Wendell Homes

A community is like a ship: everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
Henrik Ibsen

I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (1993)

Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.
Antonio Machado

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

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

A society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they shall never sit.
Unknown