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While cities are distinguished by their architecture and physical appearance, Bell and de-Shalit make a compelling case that many major world cities--and their inhabitants--also express their own distinctive ethos or values. The Spirit of Cities takes the reader on a wide-ranging and lively personal journey.
Witold RybczynskiThe opportunities of the twenty-first century make those of us who care about cities feel like kids in a candy store: How will cities survive and lead the way in the transformation required to combat global warming? Resilient Cities gives us a road map for this epic journey upon which we are embarking.
Greg NickelsThere's no getting around the fact that some cities face long odds, and governments and societies are going to be confronted with some hard decisions. Most importantly, cities have to recognize that in times of crisis they have to help themselves. Governments, no matter how well intentioned, can only do so much, especially when they themselves are so strapped for cash, as the U.S. is now. Government money will probably flow to cities and regions with good prospects for the future, so as not to risk money even further by pouring it into stalled economic models.
Richard FloridaWe have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then weโll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.
Clive BarkerCities are natural, that's why they're everywhere. It's not like there's only one city, and everybody's like 'What the f**k is this?' No, cities are all over the place. They're natural. You know what's not natural? You, in the middle of the mountains, in the middle of the winter.
Joe RoganWe have two nations, and it's not black or white. It's red and blue. Under Republican leadership, cities tend to do better. Cities are destroyed under Democrats, because they don't know how to deal with the constituency; they're terrified.
Greg GutfeldIt is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area.
Richard RodriguezIn Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.
Lester R. BrownThere are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees. And there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living.
Elmore LeonardIt's interesting, the worse things get in cities, the tougher that cities get, the more brutal the humor is. The tougher things people face, the darker the sense of humor gets and I find that incredibly optimistic.
Danny BoyleThat's not a utopian vision. It is a set of ideas that we think are important to discuss. Those ideas largely have to do with sustainability of cities. The ability of cities to, over time, remain in balance with the resource streams that are available to them, and they have to do with social justice and equity of the fundamental conditions of satisfactory citizenship.
William J. MitchellWe often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas.
Daniel LibeskindI don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.
Will OldhamWhoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.
James A. BaldwinAll through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.
Jane JacobsFifty-thousand were gathered (March,27th,1933) in and around Madison Square Garden, supportive rallies were at that moment waiting in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and about seven other American cities. At each supportive rally, thousands huddled around loudspeakers waiting for the Garden event, which would be broadcast live via radio to 200 additional cities across the country. At least 1 million Jews were participating nationwide. Perhaps another million Americans of non-Jewish descent heritage stood with them.
Edwin BlackThere are very few situations where Republicans cheat. They don't control the inner cities the way Democrats do. Maybe if Republicans controlled the inner cities they would cheat as much as Democrats.
Rudy GiulianiThe populations of most cities around the world continue to grow. The reasonspeople congregate in cities are various and complex, and the dawn of the digital age has not put much of adamper on the human urge to congregate.
Tom PetersThis [Barack Obama] administration has failed America's inner cities. Remember, it has failed America's inner cities. It's failed them on education. It's failed them on jobs. It's failed them on crime. It's failed them in every way and on every single level. When I am president, I will work to ensure that all of our kids are treated equally and protected equally.
Donald TrumpThe catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
Italo CalvinoArchitects and urbanists are fascinated with cities that are shrinking, like the Rust Belt cities. Or, alternatively, we are fascinated with the growth of favelas and informal settlements. The 2008 financial crisis made these changes more extreme. The subtraction protocols rehearse a way of thinking about multiple properties in counterbalancing interdependence - not just the shaping of one property but the ratcheting interplay between properties.
Keller EasterlingWhen corruption is visited upon the cities of men, the mountains and the deserts await him. The cities are for money but the high-up hills are purely for the soul.
Louis L'AmourAs I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this'.
Margaret AtwoodNew York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.
John Gregory DunneGun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities.
Juan WilliamsMy mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.
Tom PerrottaAt the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers - some had risen to levels of professional jobs - but they were, in some ways, protected because they were so small.
Isabel WilkersonI had come to discover that "safe" was an illusion, a pretense that adults wrapped around their children- and sometimes themselves- to make the world seem comfortable. I had discovered that under that thin cover of let's-pretend, monsters and nightmares lay, and that not all of them came from places like the moonroads or the nightling cities. Some of the monsters were people we knew. People we thought we could trust.
Holly LisleGrowing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
Barbara KingsolverIt is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.
Anna GodbersenThe most delicate beauty in the mind of women is, and ever must be, an independence of artificial stimulants for content. It is not so with men. The links that bind men to capitals belong to the golden chain of civilization,--the chain which fastens all our destinies to the throne of Jove. And hence the larger proportion of men in whom genius is pre-eminent have preferred to live in cities, though some of them have bequeathed to us the loveliest pictures of the rural scenes in which they declined to dwell.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonThousands of people marched in cities around the country to demand that Donald Trump release his taxes. He dismissed them with a tweet: "Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies. The election is over."
John YangBecause I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
James Howard KunstlerI love my city and I feel like the majority of the people that are in the city are people from other cities. So I think that L.A. sometimes might get a bad rap because it's known to be so Hollywood-oriented and then underneath that you have crime. But that's really the case in pretty much any major city that you go to.
Regina KingI'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.
Christopher WalkenBeyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work -- the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.
Vance PalmerOur large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers.
John RuskinI'm going to help the African-Americans. I'm going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities.
Donald TrumpWe have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
George W. BushThe composition of our society has been changing. We [world] are becoming a more urban population. Mega-cities, those with more than 10 million residents, are booming.
Hari SreenivasanThus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
Albert CamusWell, Italy had been overrun by the War, there had practically been civil war, north and south of the Gothic Line, heavy bombing, the northern industrial cities had been bombed heavily and we had political disorder before 1948.
Gianni Agnelli