, and he is the Associate Professor of Practice and Senior Fulbright Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
, USA, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab
. This lab studies the built environment of cities -- from street grids to plumbing and garbage systems -- using new kinds of sensors and hand-held electronics that have transformed the way we can describe and understand cities.
Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.
It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.
It’s the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It’s a quality to be proud of. But it’s a quality that many people seem to have neglected.
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.
One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.
So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal.
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.