Jacque Fresco Quotes

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

I don't say I'm not magnetic to try and sound self-deprecating. I'm just not. Though I actually love people. I would like to meet more people. I know no one.

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

We often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas.

A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.

If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody's having conversations anymore. They're sitting at dinner looking at their phone, because their brain is so addicted to it.

The way people behave towards each other is a measure of their value as human beings.

I've always been someone who likes to talk to people. When I was a little kid, I sought out freaks and weirdos that wandered the streets by where I worked in high school. I would just bring them in and talk to them.

When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.

The kind of person other people perceive you to be controls their responses to you.

Some things I like to do better than other things, but I've got to say that in the end, the thing that makes it the most interesting for me is who you're with, you know? It's people that make the difference in just about any field, right?

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way norms and standards change.

LA is such a crumbling mess of a city. Basically in all my years of travelling, I haven't found another city in the western world that interest me as much as Los Angeles - which might sound like heresy, but most cities, history has already happened and the people living there are sort of living on the bones of the thousand years of history that's already happened there. Whereas LA is always reinventing itself.