Richard Moe Quotes

Even a poor, out-of-datecollection reflects in its own way the values of the people who created it and the community it serves.

I think Star City should have Unesco World Heritage status. It will need to be adapted a little bit and made more glamorous than it looks now, but it should definitely be protected for the future.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

It's very important that historic cities are allowed to reinvent their future.

The White House is the people's house. When you do historical restoration, that must be what it is.

For too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things

In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.

I am honored to receive the TED Prize, but it's not about me; it's about our field - and the thousands of men and women around the world, particularly in the Middle East, who are defending and protecting sites.

Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.

Personally, what I would like the most is to work on a project that would aid the historic rehabilitation of Havana. It's a shame - and it gives me tremendous sadness - to see the precious buildings, to see a city, which could be the most beautiful in Latin America, falling apart and with very little money for renovations.

Federal support for Morristown National Historic Park and the inclusion of additional lands present a unique opportunity for our government to express its commitment to preserving our past. Failing to do so may allow these historically important lands to go unprotected.

The [Kwanzaa] holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people's culture.

Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.

New ideas must use old buildings

Yankee Stadium, it's like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.

Former brownfields, depressed urban areas, and hard-hit rural towns blossom as eco-industrial parks, green enterprise zones, and eco-villages. Farmers' markets, community co-ops, and mobile markets get fresh, organic produce to the people who can't afford to shop at health-food stores.

The giant neon spinning discs are a reminder of the huge role that Sam Sniderman and his store played in the cultural life of Toronto and I believe they should be preserved and remounted in the interests of our city's heritage.

We live in what virtually amounts to a museum - which does not happen to a lot of people.

There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.

We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable.

Racial and denominational schools impart to the membership of their communities something which the general educational institution is wholly unable to inculcate.

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

You can't be from Montgomery, Alabama, and not have a background in the church. It's at the core of who we are as a people.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself.