CITIES QUOTES II

quotations about cities

Cities quote

Cities are murky places--hatching grounds for monsters.

JOHN GEDDES

A Familiar Rain


By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

JANE JACOBS

The Death and Life of Great American Cities


Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

EMIL CIORAN

History & Utopia


To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

The Living City


The only city people are those born so.

GEORGE ADE

"The New Fable of the Lonesome Camp on the Frozen Heights", Ade's Fables


Every city is a living body.

ST. AUGUSTINE

City of God


Livin' in a city of immigrants
I don't need to go travelin'
Open my door and the world walks in

STEVE EARLE

"City of Immigrants"


The most dangerous savages live in cities.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, Jul. 28, 1791


The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

Characteristics


The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.

EDWARD ABBEY

"Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night", The Journey Home


Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Babbitt


A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the
whole world.

WALT WHITMAN

"Song of the Broad-Axe"


Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Society and Solitude


I don't believe there's a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin -- how do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we're convinced we must start answering the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community that will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can't find anywhere else in the world.

WALT DISNEY

attributed, Married to the Mouse


The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table


The center of civility in our society is not the small town but the big city, where you learn to thread your way through heavy traffic and subdue your aggressiveness and extend kindness to strangers. Small-town Republicans are leery of big cities and the anonymity they bestow, but there is no better place to learn the delicate ballet of social skill.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"Renouncing Evil Powers and Anonymity,", A Prairie Home Companion, Jan. 12, 2010


I've had my fill of these city guttersnipes--all that scavenging scum! They're the sort of people, who, if the gates of heaven opened to them, all they'd feel would be a draught.

HAROLD PINTER

The Dwarfs


For me, the towns where the two-legged beasts lurk are far more dangerous than the fields where the wolves roam.

KOBO ABE

Beasts Head for Home


The conditions of city life may be made healthy, so far as the physical constitution is concerned; but there is connected with the business of the city so much competition, so much rivalry, so much necessity for industry, that I think it is a perpetual, chronic, wholesale violation of natural law. There are ten men that can succeed in the country, where there is one that can succeed in the city.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

Royal Truths