Quotes About Cities

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. And, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with.

We need to review our policies as it applies to urban cities - You see, I'm losing either of them, but especially cities like Baltimore, we need to review them and I think we should come with no pre conception.

It'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.

I 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.

Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers.

When mayors get together they probably have better conversations and have better notes to share about running different cities, and just do what suits. Basically, like when you combine all the religions and take the best bits, you should be able to combine all the cities and take the best bits, the information, the tried and tested things.

There 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.

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will soon recover from the panic of this first catastrophe.

That power of the Gods which orders for the good things which are not uniform, and which happen contrary to expectation, is commonly called Fortune, and it is for this reason that the Goddess is especially worshipped in public by cities; for every city consists of elements which are not uniform.

There was a time when Istanbul was one of the safest cities in the world, because people were afraid of the police. People are no longer as afraid of the police as they used to be. Mugging used to be almost unknown; now everybody is afraid of mugging. In that sense, the downside of liberalization is already being felt in Turkey. And of course some people are afraid of Kurdish ethno-terrorism, which worries Turks very much more than the religious sort.

Vrndavana is one of the holiest cities in India. Everyone, everywhere, chants Hare Krishna. It was my most fantastic experience.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!

So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.

In America, we have cities that are far more dangerous than Afghanistan.

Delhi is locked in a complete choking smog at the moment - they've had to close schools in one of the world's biggest cities. They have their own reasons for needing to get off fossil fuels fast.

But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.

I always felt that I was born in the wrong era. I wanted to be friends with John Garfield, for instance. He was one of the only actors that refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee back when the Hollywood Ten blacklist was happening in the McCarthy period. I wish I could've been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That's my period. I feel real close to the '40s - and actually I was born in '37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the '40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.

There is no chance of night baseball ever being popular in the bigger cities. People there are educated to see the best there is and will stand for only the best. High-class baseball cannot be played at night under artificial light.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and I've made movies all over the world... I've been in New York, Norway, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, London - I've been in all these cities, shooting away in the winter, thinking, 'People who choose to live here are insane.

Things can happen in some cities and the tale of them will be interesting: the same story laid in another city would be ridiculous.

Oh, do you have A Tale of Two Cities?" "That silly thing? Men going around getting their heads chopped off for love? Ridiculus." Will unpeeled himself from the door and made his way toward Tessa where she stood by the bookshelves. He gestured expansively at the vast number of volumes all around him. "No, here you'll find all sorts of advice about how to chop off someone else's head if you need to; much more useful.

Slavery remained in the Deep South by other names - in prison programs with charges over nothing and eternal debt that threatened every African-American in the South right up through World War II. And that was after killing three-quarters of a million people, destroying cities, and creating hostility that exists to this day over the the Confederate flag and the racism it symbolizes, all brewing out of bitterness over a war that didn't have to happen.

As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

If tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "We will mete out to them [the Germans] the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us... We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best."

We've directed the creation of a task force for reducing violent crime in America, including the horrendous situation - take a look at Chicago and others - taking place right now in our inner cities.

For years, the Democrats have controlled the inner cities; some up to 100 years; some over 100 years; unbroken. I say to the African American community and to the Hispanic community: What the hell do you have to lose? I will fix it. We will make them good. We'll make them safe. We'll bring back jobs. We'll create good, good schools and education.

It's taken a hundred years or more for some of these places [inner cities] to evolve and they evolved many of them very badly, but we're going to work very hard on health and health care.

It's in every single county. It's in our cities but it's also in our wealthier suburbs. It's in our small towns. There is no place in Ohio where you can hide from drug epidemic .

We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.

Of all cities in the United States I have seen, San Francisco is the most beautiful.

In cities it is useless to look at the stars or to describe them, worship them, or seek direction from them. When lost, one should follow the tracks of the camels.

As the number of available jobs has decreased in border states like Texas, cities halfway across America have begun to see an influx of illegal immigrants in search of employment.

Next to bombing, rent control is the most effective technique so far known for destroying cities.

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world.

Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope - I seem to recall they were always cropping up on Doctor Who when I was young, though I may be misremembering.

I haven't travelled that much before so this is the first time I get to see the big cities of Europe. I've never even been to US.

I think that cinema is a great place to make stories of loneliness. And being Norwegian, I don't want to make the film about loneliness in being out in nature on a mountaintop; it's about being in the cities.

Crime is fast destroying the moral fabric of South African cities, and is becoming a major threat to South African democracy as well as the prominent manifestation of a "class war" that is largely a continuation of the "race war" of yesterday.

The greatest threat now is a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities...there's a high probability of such an attempt.

There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence?

I'm not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I'm just a corpse who wants not to be.

All cities have one key resource: the special abilities of the people who live in them. You just have to find out what they are. In the Australian city of Adelaide, for example, which is overshadowed by Sydney and Melbourne, I discovered a number of experts in the penal system. I advised them to work with these special skills.

all large cities are alike at night.