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.

What people want now, they want jobs. They want great jobs with good pay. And I'll tell you, we're spending a lot of money on the inner cities - we are fixing the inner cities - we are doing far more than anybody has done with respect to the inner cities. It is a priority for me, and it's very important.

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] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

When the back-to-the-cities trend started taking root, albeit very unevenly, cities were so glad to finally land deals that they routinely overpaid, not having a solid grasp of the demographic and market forces they should have been channeling instead of subsidizing. It’s especially true for retail and entertainment projects, which generate very poor-quality jobs. I have yet to find a city that has figured out how to ‘take the foot off the pedal’ and stop over-subsidizing, even when gentrification becomes a problem.

That'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.

My administration will end the sanctuary cities that have resulted in so many needless deaths. Cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities will not receive taxpayer dollars, and we will work with Congress to pass legislation to protect those jurisdictions that do assist federal authorities.

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.

Big cities have a lot of 'younger brothers' who have left traditional parts of the world and their families for a more liberal lifestyle. But cities are filled to the gills with 'elder brothers' too.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

Cities 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.

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.

The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.

New 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.

It's just the banks who are the latest target of the American socialist left. There is a war on the entirety of the private sector. It is the private sector that employs most of you, that services most of you, that creates the economic prosperity that our nation has enjoyed - and there is a war on that private sector, and it's being waged from the Oval Office, and its foot soldiers are on Wall Street and in other cities around the country.

In Europe we have cities wealthier and more populous than yours and we are not happy. You dream of your posterity; but your posterity will look back to yours as the golden age, and envy those who first burst into this silent, splendid Nature.

People care. Their hearts are open, but people don't know exactly what the Dreamers are going through, or what sanctuary cities are for, or what's positive about the American Muslim community. When you don't know a lot, you can't do a lot.

Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

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.

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.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

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.

The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.

And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

When 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.

Everyone of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school

There is nothing in either savage or civilized history that is more utterly complete, more remorselessly sweeping than the Father of Mercy´s campaign among the Midianites. The official report deals only in masses, all the virgins, all the men, all the babies. all ´creatures that breathe,´ all houses. all cities. It gives you just one vast picture ...as far as the eye can reach, of charred ruins and storm-swept desolation... Would you expect this same conscienceless God, this moral bankrupt, to become a teacher of morals, of gentleness, of meekness, of righteousness, of purity?

Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that's more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.

Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.

In the burning and devastated cities, we daily experienced the direct impact of war. It spurred us to do our utmost...the bombing and the hardships that resulted from them did not weaken the morale of the populace.

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.

The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Does [America] realize the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a missile that can cross to countries and cities?

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

There 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.

Obviously these conditions [violence, poverty] predate the [Barack] Obama presidency and the president has limited ways to dent this violence. But funding war weapons in cities, as opposed to more community policing, is not the solution.

All nations are degrading and consuming their environment to a point beyond capacity. In the past 15 years in the U.S. we have added 1300 cities with populations over 100,000. When the environment is forced to file Chapter 11, the ecology collapses. Nations recover from war but not from a failed eco-system. The status of our environment is more threatening than all wars. It is forever.

Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that.

In my regular life, I am very involved in commissions for cities and sometimes countries. And I think of public art as a team sport. The outcome is only possible with the interaction of all the players.