Richard Florida Quotations

Minneapolis-St. Paul is competing for a very mobile group of people who have the world for their choices.

I have always, always wanted to live in Washington,

If an employer is serious about attracting and retaining talent, about making Wisconsin the kind of place they can do business over the long haul, they've got to understand that the ability for all people to feel welcome is absolutely critical.

If the foreign talent cannot get into the United States or faces considerable delays in doing so, companies are in effect forced to go overseas to get it.

L.A. draws highly skilled Asians and San Francisco draws highly skilled gays, but D.C. draws highly skilled everybody -- gays, Latins, Asians, Africans, scientists and so on, ... The trick will be to avoid pricing ourselves out of that creativity.

I think we do need more time off, but it's not a government issue. It needs to be a social thing. People need to realize that working all the time and ignoring families is not healthy.

people are really smart and engaged. There's no better place in the country to write serious nonfiction. There's no better place to be public intellectuals.

You know what they say, they say we want our kids back. We want them to stop leaving. What they don't say is that they want other people's kids to move there.

Cities have realized that they can attract educated people and they don't need good schools to do it.

You've got these housing markets that are completely out of whack. There's no point of entry for young people anymore.

Builders need to take their preeminent position back from the traders for the economy of the future to flourish.

Denser cities are smarter and more productive

New Jersey boasts the highest percentage of passport holders (68%); Delaware (67%), Alaska (65%), Massachusetts (63%), New York (62%), and California (60%) are close behind. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than one in five residents of Mississippi are passport holders, and just one in four residents of West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas.

Snoop is a tour de force! It’s one of the smartest and most original books I’ve come across in a long time. I devoured it and then rushed over to clean up my desk and change my iPod playlist.

Beneath the surface, unnoticed by many, an even deeper force was at work—the rise of creativity as a fundamental economic driver, and the rise of a new social class, the Creative Class.

The creative individual is no longer viewed as an iconoclast. He—or she—is the new mainstream.

Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.

Ideas are the currency of the new economy.

Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.

Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource.

Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don't.

Access to talented and creative people is to modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making.

People don't need to be managed, they need to be unleashed.

I call the age we are entering the creative age because the key factor propelling us forward is the rise of creativity as the primary mover of our economy.