You live only once The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once. The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard." Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style grammar
Most cities were mostly built by improvisation In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky documented the ways in which most cities were mostly built by improvisation, following no consistent formal design. Building was added to building, street to street, their forms adapting to different site conditions in the process of extension. Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas 'renewal' projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman I am hereNon-architects urbanism