Perak is living through a slow decline; and because we have failed to acknowledge and respond properly, we are heading aimlessly. Our places are lagging behind the world’s rapid progress, our ideas are confused, and we are moving without coordination and adjustment. We have many plans but we are not planning and we have not defined our respective roles.

Anthony H.K. Eng

This is a pivotal time for urban regeneration. We must take a long term view.

Richard Rogers

I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time.

Joseph Beuys

I have never learned to tune a flute or play upon a harp, but I can take a small and obscure city and raise it to greatness.

Themistocles, Greece, 459 BC

Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small. The difficult things in this world must be done while they are easy, the greatest things in the world must be done while they are still small. For this reason sages never do what is great, and this is why they achieve greatness.

Sun Tzu, 400 BC

The suburb is a place where a developer cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees.

Bill Vaughn

Planning is a process of choosing among those many options. If we do not choose to plan, then we choose to have others plan for us.

Richard I. Winwood

It’s a bad plan that admits of no modification.

Publilius Syrus, 100 BC

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

Gloria Steinam, 1980

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

Socrates, 469-399 BC

For every site there is an ideal use. For every use there is an ideal site.

John Ormsbee Simonds

If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail.

Tariq Siddique

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 4 BC-65 AD

For the family, sacrifice the individual; For the city, sacrifice the family; For the country, sacrifice the city; For the soul, sacrifice the world.

Ancient Sanskrit verse

The trouble with land is that they’re not making it anymore.

Will Rogers

The real voyage of discovery and change does not consist in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

We are in the habit of never walking if we can ride.

Louis Philippe, 1798

A good plan today is better that a perfect plan tomorrow.

Geoge S. Patton

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold.

Lewis Mumford, 1961

Trend is not destiny.

Lewis Mumford

Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.

Edward T. McMahon

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

Antonio Machado

But the prospect offers us several choices – the quickest is annihilation as anthropocentric man produces the holocaust; population is slower. Starvation is real and prevalent; it will become worse, but starving can be unheard from far around the world. The erosion of the rights of man will strike others first, and our losses will be imperceptible; children will be born who did not know life otherwise. The land will be raped and creatures extirpated because the inconsistencies will be so loud; who can plan for the long term when survival is today? The cities will grow as they have, enlarging the pathology of their hearts, growing into necropoles. What other prospect can you see?

Ian McHarg, 1969

The metropolitan region is now the functional unit of our environment, and it is desirable that this functional unit should be identified and structured by its inhabitants. The new means of communication which allow us to live and work in such a large interdependent region, could also allow us to make our images commensurate with our experiences.

K. Lynch, 1960

Good judgment is the result of experience. And experience is frequently the result of bad judgment.

Robert Lovett, 1969

Because 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 people 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, 1993

The living arrangements big cities now think of as normal are bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically and spiritually.

James Howard Kunstler, 1993

A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.

H. Stanely Judd

…our cities of the present lack the outstanding symbol of national community which, we must therefore not be surprised to find, sees no symbol of itself in the cities. The inevitable result is a desolation whose practical effect is the total indifference of the big-city dweller to the destiny of his city.

Adolf Hitler, 1943

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Milton Friedman

As for the future, your task is not to forsee it, but to enable it.

Antoine de Saint Exupery, 1900-1944

Let the river roll which way it will, cities will rise on its banks.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

Plans are worthless. Planning is essential.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1890-1961

The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.

Albert Einstein, 1879-1955

In complex situations, we may rely too heavily on planning and forecasting and underestimate the importance of random factors in the environment. That reliance can also lead to delusions of control.

Hillel J. Einhorn

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

Andres Duany

“Smart Growth” is a code word for whatever the user of this term wants to achieve concerning metropolitan development yet different users of the term have totally different goals, so “smart growth” can mean almost anything. In spite of its diverse and often conflicting meanings, all parties superficially endorse “smart growth” because it is clearly superior to the alternative: “dumb growth.”

Anthony Downs

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

Charles Darwin

We do make a difference — one way or the other. We are responsible for the impact of our lives. Whatever we do with whatever we have, we leave behind us a legacy for those who follow.

Stephen Covey

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.

Chinese Proverb

The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession…

Horace Bushnell

Burn down our cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

Williams Jennings Bryan

In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves.

Urie Bronferbrenner

A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

Douglas Adams, 1952-2001

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Edward Abbey, 1927-1989