quotations about cities
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
Cities are murky places--hatching grounds for monsters.
JOHN GEDDES
A Familiar Rain
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
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
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
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
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"
The most dangerous savages live in cities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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 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
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"
Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
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
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Society and Solitude
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 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
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