Popular quotes about Cities! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 6
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
Jane JacobsWhile 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 RybczynskiThere are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times.
Noel PerrinNothing lasts forever. Butโespecially as it seems to me cities and humans are symbiotically and inextricably bound at this pointโI hope cities have a good, long run. Plus, cities are beautiful creatures in their own right; and as with us, their vulnerability and ephemerality are part of that beauty.
Alex ShakarIn some big cities [in Pakistan] some women have access to a job and education - but the UN reported that more than 5 million girls cannot go to school. It's become an open secret. In some big cities they build schools to deceive people around the world, while the level of education remains very low, and even when they can go to school there is no security.
Malalai JoyaCompared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.
Charles C. MannEvery 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.
Jimenez LaiCities must urge urban planners and architects to reinforce pedestrianism as an integrated city policy to develop lively, safe, sustainable and healthy cities. It is equally urgent to strengthen the social function of city space as a meeting place that contributes toward the aims of social sustainability and an open and democratic society.
Jan GehlWhoever 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 JacobsWhile the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.
Daniel J. BoorstinWhat's somewhat puzzling is that Churchill himself knew what the reaction would be to any sort of aerial attack on cities, because in 1938 he said that in a future war British cities would be attacked by bombing, and that the response would be that all men would want to join the fight because they would be so incensed by this cowardly manner of attack. Which is a very natural response: when something drops on you from the air and blows up a bunch of buildings and kills people in their sleep, the reaction is going to be rage, confusion, and a search for something to destroy in retaliation.
Nicholson BakerFrom space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes. In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.
Jonathan Safran FoerCities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. If those hearts darken and lose faith, cities will lose their glamour.
Elif SafakArchitects 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 EasterlingWe have reached a point where the value we do add to our economy is now being outweighed by the value we are removing, not only from future generations in terms of diminished resources, but from ourselves in terms of unlivable cities, deadening jobs, deteriorating health, and rising crime. In biological terms, we have become a parasite and are devouring our host.
Paul HawkenWe have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.
Grace Lee BoggsCities originally surrounded by a wall can produce an urban population cut off from the surrounding fields and from agriculture altogether. At the same time, the greenbelt laws eliminate the possibility of the unchecked expansion of a city into a monstrous megalopolis. If there is a need for additional homes, a new city must be established.
Yehuda LeviVrndavana is one of the holiest cities in India. Everyone, everywhere, chants Hare Krishna. It was my most fantastic experience.
George HarrisonThe old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
Thomas WolfeAfter World War II, a lot of people moved to the cities for work and abandoned the old vineyards. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, wineries were paid to produce volume at a cheap price. That's when the Lambruscos and bad Chianti were popular.
Joe BastianichI like New York in the spring and in the fall. It's one of the best cities to walk that I've ever been in.
Terry O'QuinnI enjoy Chicago as one of the great American cities. When I come here and take a taxi from the airport, I meet a young man from Somalia. I meet a young man from Eritrea who engages with this nation with a sense of hope and a sense of desire. But we also we know that there are other elements of this nation that are toxic.
Kehinde WileyThere 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.
Clark GriffithIn populous cities, which are the seat of commerce and manufactures, the middle ranks of inhabitants, who derive their subsistence from the dexterity or labour of their hands, are commonly the most prolific, the most useful, and, in that sense, the most respectable part of the community.
Edward GibbonOur traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.
Marina WarnerCities with clean air gain an economic advantage, because where people want to live and work, businesses want to invest.
Michael BloombergIn the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson[London is] one of the best cities in the world. There is just so much culture there and so much history and so much diversity. It's just a perfect place to grow up. I studied at the Guildhall every Saturday so I'd always be in town every weekend doing that. I was kind of a city boy really.
Douglas BoothIt'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.
Donald TrumpWhen you move from a different country, it takes a while to make friends. I found myself being lonely a lot at first. In New Delhi, I had all my family. But Portland is one of those cities you can immerse yourself in and feel comfortable. People are so friendly.
Kunal NayyarMoving 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.
Philip ReeveWhite swan of cities slumbering in thy nest . . . White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowWe [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.
William J. MitchellI have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
C. S. LewisThe only bridge I've ever burned along this legacy I dance is the one that linked the cities of prosperity and chance.
Aesop RockAll 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.
Charles LandryThus 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 CamusWhen time permits, I try to see interesting people in the cities I visit. In Seattle, I met Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, who is shy in personality but flamboyant in his philanthropy.
Steven PinkerWe accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and, by the very nature of their enterprises, leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What's more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, the government places no cultural or market value on the land itself.
Wade DavisMy work doesn't speak about individuals (it's not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West - which is where I live and what I understand.
Beat StreuliI would say one thing people need to do - and his is how Roosevelt's New Deal began - let us go back to cities and states where we can, build emblematic progressive reforms, like the Fight for 15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, things that improve the conditions of people's lives and that drive them into a national message.
Katrina vanden HeuvelQuite frankly, we have seen liberal policies in cities like Chicago, like New York and others, have led to increased crime.
Chris ChristieThe bottom line is that we have entered an age when local communities need to invest in themselves. Federal and state dollars are becoming more and more scarce for American cities. Political and civic leaders in local communities need to make a compelling case for this investment.
Mick CornettAeschylus and Plato are remembered today long after the triumphs of Imperial Athens are gone. Dante outlived the ambitions of thirteenth century Florence. Goethe stands serenely above the politics of Germany, and I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over cities, we too will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
John F. KennedyThere are really at least two Indias, there is an India or a shining India the one which the west seas usually through urbanize and there is an India outside some of the big metro policies and in even the tier two cities and in rural India which is completely different. It goes by the name of Bahar which is a traditional name for India.
Cyril Shroff