Quotes About Cities

Fifty percent of the world's population lives in cities. In a couple of decades, 70 percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Cities are where the problem is. Cities are where the solution is, where creativity exists to address the challenges and where they have most impact. This is why, in 2005, the C40 was founded, an organization of cities that address climate change. It started with 18 cities; now it's 91. Cities simply are the key to saving the planet.

You came to tell us that the great cities are in favour of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile plains. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy out farms and the grass will grow in the city...You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

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.

Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities. There are nuanced senses that only people from the region can understand, and no amount of globalization can change that. It's almost like a maxim of a sorts, when you think about language, the way that people speak in a location. It does happen with architects, in terms of how they engage cities.

In 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.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities.

In the 10 cities with the nation's highest obesity rates, the direct costs connected with obesity and obesity-related diseases are roughly $50 million per 100,000 residents. And if these 10 cities just cut their obesity rates down to the national average, all added up they combine to save nearly $500 million in healthcare costs each year.

A range of studies shows there is no evidence immigrants commit more crime than native-born Americans. In fact, first generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans. The two cities in this country most impacted by undocumented immigrants, you would think of the New York City with over 500,000 and Los Angeles, with a similar amount. Both those cities are among the safest in the free world.

Protecting dozens of major coastal cities from future flooding will be challenging enough-rebuilding major coastal cities destroyed by super-hurricanes will be an almost impossible task.

If you want to help people, if you care, go to the cities. The city is where the pain is the greatest - and the cities are a hell of a lot of fun if you like art, movies and plays.

My husband and I like cities. We like to go to other cities. Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London. We're not big beach people. We're the type that get those books out and go to every museum. We are those people.

Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.

Honestly, I think winning changes all of that. It doesn't matter where you are - it could be Timbuktu - if you win, people will watch, they'll follow and they'll support. It's my responsibility to put a team on the floor that will win, and that attracts players. Look at the teams that have been successful in the NBA. Yes, you have big, glamorous cities like L.A. But Miami has won, and so has San Antonio. Oklahoma City is a very successful team. They're not the biggest markets.

In cities like Athens, poor houses lined narrow and tortuous streets in spite of luxurious public buildings.

The paradox in China is that while some things change very rapidly, others don't. The appearance of its cities may be entirely different, but the inner workings behind these changes still persist: the regulation of society, the hierarchies of power, the relationship of the individual to the majority.

Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.

In the rush of today's world, and with more than half of us now living in cities, the majority of people are less and less connected with the spectacle of Nature.

We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.

Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to Nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colours, thereby fostering racial chaos.

Whenever we make changes in our surroundings, we can too easily shortchange ourselves, by cutting ourselves off from some of the sights and sounds, the shapes or textures, or other information from a place that have helped mold our understanding and are now necessary for us to thrive. Overdevelopment and urban sprawl can damage our own lives as much as they damage our cities and countryside.

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.

Well, on tour I eat terribly, so I balance that by running a lot. And then I started to run with my fans in certain cities. It sounds very nerdy and un-rock n' roll, but I like it. It's fun, and it's better than meeting fans in weird, awkward circumstances. So I take them running with me.

Violence from protesters themselves is extremely rare, but has been made into a talking point by those who stand to benefit from breaking the perceived legitimacy of organized protest and resistance. Organized, disciplined nonviolent resistance is alive and well, and we see it all around us in cities across the country.

Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.

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."

The Boston's government approves housing projects every month and we're constantly approving opportunities to build more housing. And Boston is one of the hottest cities in America where people want to live. And it's important that we continue to build this housing and to keep up with the demand that we have in the communities.

Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

Our 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.

In my own country, many of the movies in recent years express our innate fears about what awaits us. They are apocalyptic visions that leave only a few people on earth-whole cities surviving under domes because we have depleted our natural resources. And often in these movies, for reasons that I question, we have space aliens who are always blowing up Washington, D.C., and the White House.

To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now.

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.

Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance.

It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.

The Germans are often too bureaucratic, too fixated on rules and not risk-oriented enough. And some of their officials have the feeling that they need to make everything in the cityscape look nice and pretty as quickly as possible. That was particularly apparent in the former East Germany after reunification. Then cities sometimes get a bit too neat and tidy.

Let us pause before the Child of Bethlehem. Let us allow our hearts to be touched, let us allow ourselves to be warmed by the tenderness of God; we need his caress. God is full of love: to him be praise and glory forever! God is peace: let us ask him to help us to be peacemakers each day, in our life, in our families, in our cities and nations, in the whole world. Let us allow ourselves to be moved by God's goodness.

And the Lord said: I burn down your cities - how blind you must be. I take from you your children, and you say how blessed are we. You all must be crazy to put your faith in me. That's why I love mankind.

In Chicago 3,000 people have been shot since January 1st. We're not going to let that happen. Our inner cities are almost at an all-time low, run by the Democrats for sometimes more than a hundred years, chain unbroken.

Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic.

Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam. And Italy is an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony... In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families.

as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities. Nobody else in the world can do it, or ever could do it, or ever will be able to do it again.

What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.

Well, I have a lot of appetites and try to revel in almost everything, so inspiration can even come from a well-appointed submarine sandwich, you know? Potentially in the form of The Godmother from Santa Monica's Bay Cities [Italian Deli &] Bakery. But for a primal "Wow, every sense is on fire!" moment, it would have to be live music.