“It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls”

“Marcovaldo learned to pile the snow into a compact little wall. If he went on making little walls like that, he could build some street for himself alone; only he would know where these streets led, and everybody else would be lost there. He would remake the city, pile up mountains high as houses, which no one would be able to tell from real houses. But perhaps by now all the houses had turned to snow, inside and out, a whole city of snow and with monuments and spires and trees, a city could be unmade by shovel and remade in a different way.”

“Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.”

“Sometimes we build such high walls for protection that we forget that our greatest enemy can grow from within.”

“A man can learn wisdom even from a foe”

“History is studied. Lessons are learned from it.”