I'm a pessimist about probabilities, I'm an optimist about possibilities.

The city, with language...remains man's greatest work of art, a place where 'time becomes visible,' and 'mind takes form.'

Wood, then, was the most various, the most shapeable, the most serviceable of all the materials that man has employed in his technology: evan stone was at best an accessory.

The rational conquest of the environment by means of machines is fundamentally the work of a woodman...Stone is a mass: but wood, by its nature, is already a structure.

Every generation revolt against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

In war, the army is not merely a pure consumer, but a negative producer.

War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.

Even in the eighteenth century, before either the French Revolution or the paleotechnic revolution had been consummated, it had become the fashion to discredit municipal authorities and to sneer at local interests. In the newly organized states, even those based on republican principles, only matters of national moment, organized by political parties, counted in men’s hopes or dreams.

Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life’s absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.

Primitive man’s life in Hobbes’ famous words, was short, brutish, and nasty; and this very savagery and anxiety became the justification for an absolute order established, like Descartes’ ideal world, by a single providential mind and will: that of the absolute ruler or monarch. Until men were incorporated into Leviathan, that is, the all-powerful state through which the king’s will was carried out, they were dangerous to their fellows and a burden to themselves.