quotations about cities
Nations die first in the big cities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.
STEPHEN KING
"1922,", Full Dark
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Miss Scalpel"
Cities are the abyss of the human species.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Émile
Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.
THEODORE PARKER
Lessons from the World of Matter and the World of Men
For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.
SIMON VAN BOOY
Everything Beautiful Began After
The city's full of people who you just see around.
TERRY PRATCHETT
Men at Arms
I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain. One of the great Catalan poets, Joan Maragall, wrote this famous poem in which he called Barcelona the great enchantress, or some kind of sorceress, and in which the city has this dark enticing presence that seduces and lures people. I think Barcelona has a lot of that.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Independent, Jun. 24, 2012
We flee away from cities, but we bring
The best of cities, these learned classifiers,
Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"The Adirondacs,", May-Day and Other Pieces
The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual’s dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON
speech to Congress, Mar. 2, 1965
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
ITALO CALVINO
Invisible Cities
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
My Heart Laid Bare
The people are the city.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Coriolanus
A twofold national problem is how to preserve the wilderness in the country and get rid of the jungle in the cities.
BILL VAUGHAN
attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes
Ideal cities are very much the product of their own ages. Designed as complete urban statements, they bear the unmistakable imprint of their own culture and world view in every street and building. And yet to be successful a city has to be open to continuous development, free to evolve and grow with the demands of new times. Like science fiction accounts of the future, ideal cities quickly become outmoded.
P. D. SMITH
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.
GRAHAM GREENE
Our Man in Havana
Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down.... When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.
DON DELILLO
Point Omega
In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out. All the agencies of inquisition--the hounds of the trail, the sleuths of the city's labyrinths, the closet detectives of theory and induction--will be invoked to the search. Most often the man's face will be seen no more. Sometimes he will reappear in Sheboygan or in the wilds of Terre Haute, calling himself one of the synonyms of "Smith," and without memory of events up to a certain time, including his grocer's bill. Sometimes it will be found, after dragging the rivers, and polling the restaurants to see if he may be waiting for a well-done sirloin, that he has moved next door.
O. HENRY
"The Sleuths"
You could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house--it was their address, but that didn't mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren't fair game for cats or traps.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man