Dan Gilbert Quotes

I grew up in the city of Detroit, where things were just bad.

If those communities are left to decay, this city will decay.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

Haiti looks like a bomb hit it.

There are some who praise a man free from disease; to me no man who is poor seems free from disease but to be constantly sick.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.

... the fires of neglect.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed

I'd probably put myself in the top 1% in knowledge of blight in the city of Detroit.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

Humans have grown like a cancer. We're the biggest blight on the face of the earth.

Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.

What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

No one wins a war. It is true, there are degrees of loss, but no one wins.

I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf... than be king of all these dead and destroyed.

Home, home -- a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.

The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.

The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye.