Geoffrey West

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That's how much power you need just to lie down. And if you're a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you'll need about 250 watts. That's how much energy it takes to run about and find food.”

“Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.”

“It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.”

“Every fundamental law has exceptions. But you still need the law or else all you have is observations that don't make sense. And that's not science. That's just taking notes.”

“The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.”

“Your cells are not working as hard as your dog's but harder than your horse's. The bigger the animal, the less energy needed to sustain a gram of tissue.”

“Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.”

“I've always wanted to find the rules that govern everything. It's amazing that such rules exist. It's even more amazing that we can find them.”

“Cities are the crucible of civilization.”

“Life is extraordinarily resilient. It's been around for over a billion years.”

“We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.”

“On average, an individual doesn't have a powerful connection with more than four to six people, and that's just as true here in the U.S. as it is in China.”

“Everything around us is scale dependent. It's woven into the fabric of the universe.”

“If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. They've come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That's why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

“When you look at a city, you know, it looks so unique. You feel this kind of uniqueness, you know, and especially if you go from a big city to a small city or if you go from one country to another. Cities look very different, often. They even feel very different. You know, and they are, of course. They certainly are.”

“A city plays the role of a great big magnet that's sucking people up.”

“I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.”

“Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill. We traded away stability for growth. And growth requires change.”

“Tell me the size of a mammal and I can tell you, to about 85 per cent level, pretty much everything about its physiology and life history, such as how long it is going to live, how many offspring it will have, the length of its aorta, how long it will take to mature, what is the pulse rate in the ninth branch of its circuitry.”

“Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where they - all these problems come from.”