Richard Florida Quotes

As Secretary of Defense I have to be cautious and prudent.

We can’t be a great country unless we have great cities.

I took over a Brazil in the midst of a profound ethical, moral, and economic crisis. We are committed to changing our history... We want to govern by example.

Bundling finance, energy solutions, water solutions, traffic infrastructure, and all general urban infrastructures is too much of an ask for most developing cities.

I can sign all of the emergency proclamations I want, but that's not going to fix the infrastructure in urban Honolulu.

The fear among economists across the political spectrum that was - was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second Great Depression. So, in the weeks and months that followed, we undertook a series of difficult steps to prevent that outcome. And we were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.

When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.

We need to address significant funding gaps when it comes to implementing the SDGs.

It's all about connectivity - not just technical connectivity but geographic connectivity. That's what makes a city go.

Saving New York City from bankruptcy is like making love to a gorilla. You don't stop when you're tired; you stop when he's tired.

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.

Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.

Some decisions, like opening a fire hydrant to put out a fire, are easy to make. Other decisions, like deciding how to best distribute a drought-limited water supply among urban, rural and recreational uses, require careful deliberation.

[Obama White House] rescued the economy from the worst recession.

I do not feel that we should allow a shortage of funds to prevent cities from financing needed projects.

Let's adopt some short-term strategies to get growth going and then let's have a long-term debt reduction package. That's what I think we should do and I think it will work.

When you inherit the level of economic catastrophe that President Obama inherited, it was a real touch-and-go situation.

If you put these five things together - you can't use money to attract talent, you can't advertise, you can't take risks, you can't invest in long-term results, and you don't have a stock market - then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole system charity, as if there is something incredibly sweet about it.

The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman-and each nation-must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

I'm just glad that on a budget like this I don't have to make any of those hard decisions because I feel it must be a real job to direct this, as there's so much going on.

Barack Obama is a president who, when he had to deal with the 2008 economic crisis, has led the American economy on a completely different path than the one that Europe has chosen eight years later.

The President [Barack Obama], I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.

The people with the most resources are the federal government. If you can invade a country halfway across the world in a matter of days, you can surely come to the aid of your own citizens in a shorter order of time.

We already know enough to begin to cope with all the major problems that are now threatening human life and much of the rest of life on earth. Our crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of decision of policy and action.