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| Manhattan, New York City on an early morning |
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one. Aristotle
The urban man is an uprooted tree; he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth. Juan Ramon Jimenez
London, the great cesspool into which all the loungers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A city is a large community where people are lonesome together. Herbert Prochnow
Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. Jane Jacob
The only real advantage of New York is that all its inhabitants ascend to heaven right after their deaths, having served their full term in hell right on Manhattan Island. Barnard College newsletter
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble. Caesar Augustus
Forgive us when we deplore violence in our cities if we live in suburbs, where lawns are clipped and churches enlarge, or in green villages where there are too many steeples. Church text
We should realize that a city is better off with bad laws, so long as they remain fixed, then with good laws that are constantly being altered. Cleon, Thucydides, III
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. Ernest Hemingway
Cities produce ferocious men, because they produce corrupt men; the mountain, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human. Victor Hugo
The modern town-dweller has no god and no devil; he lives without awe, without admiration, without fear. William Ralph Inge
In a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. Francis Bacon
What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? Emerson
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go. Truman Capote
The consequences of making this vision a reality, as most now recognize, has been disastrous, producing the shattered urban wastelands that have desolated entire communities and disemboweled some of our greatest cities. Charles, Prince of Wales on Le Corbusier
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. E. B. White
The real illness of the American city today, and especially of the deprived groups within it, is voicelessness. Harvey Cox
The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave. Edward Gibbon
It is one of the sublime principals of New York that its inhabitants lap up trivial gossip about essential nobodies they’ve never set eyes on, while continuing to boast that they could live somewhere for twenty years without so much as exchanging pleasantries with their neighbors across the hall. Louis Kronenberger
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in the morning. Cyril Connolly
God made the country and man-made the town. William Cowper
I think that every town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick would never be cut for fuel, not for the navy, not to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses; a common possession for instruction and recreation. Henry Thoreau
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city. Charles Caleb Colton
We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination. Architect: Le Corbusier
The city man in his neon and mazda glare, know nothing of nature’s midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age old night. Edwin Way Teal
I live not in myself, but I become a portion of that around me; and to me high mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities a torture. Byron
The modern building like a gigantic machine…. Lifts must swarm up the facade like serpents of glass and iron. The house of concrete, iron and glass, without ornament; brutish in all its mechanical simplicity, must rise up the brink of a tumultuous abyss, the street… gathering up the traffic of the metropolis connected for necessary transfers to metal cat walks and high speed conveyor belts. Marinetti: The Futurist Manifesto
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford. Samuel Johnson
In great cities men are like a lot of stones thrown together in a bag; their jagged corners are rubbed off till in the end they are as smooth as marbles. W Somerset Maugham
To say the least, a town life makes one more tolerant and liberal in ones judgement of others. Longfellow
In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the country. William Hazlitt
New York has total depth in every area. Washington has only politics; after that, the second biggest thing is white marble. John V. Lindsay
A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral. Max Beerbohm
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. Albert Einstein
A ghetto can be improved in one way only; out of existence. James Baldwin
The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
In the big city a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out. O. Henry
A final dittie.
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.
Rudyard Kipling
