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I decided that if nobody else was going to do anything to rectify this colossal inequity in taxation, I'd have to do it myself. So I instituted a suit against the city of Baltimore demanding that the city assessor be specifically ordered to assess the Church for its vast property holdings in the city, and that the city tax collector then be instructed to collect the taxes once the assessment has been made.
Madalyn Murray O'HairImagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet.
BanksyThe great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.
Nelson AlgrenI sit on the steps in the heat of the sun and listen as one by one these car alarms extinguish themselves until once more only the muted roar of the city is audible, and the city, bathed in sunlight, once again resumes dreaming its collective dream. Cars roll down the city's roads, plants grow from its soil, wealth is generated in its rooms, hope is created and lost and recreated in the minds and souls of its inhabitants, and the city continues its dream and searches for those ideas that will make it strong.
Douglas CouplandA city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city.
Leon KrierMiami Beach is a completely interesting hybrid because it is, on the one hand, a resort and, on the other hand, a real city. This condition of city and water on two sides I think is really amazing. And in the heart of that city, it has put an enormous convention center, an enormous physical presence.
Rem KoolhaasWalkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.
Rebecca SolnitI opposed annexing in areas around our city borders, because I knew that if neighborhoods wanted to be a part of the city, well, they would mandate themselves in and invite themselves into a city. That's just one example of even on a local level how dangerous it is for a politician to start thinking they know more than that individual family, that individual business.
Sarah PalinThe secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die.
Jaime LernerSo here's my advice to city planners. Make your city runnable. Runners are the first wave of troops bringing human activity back to the urban core of any city. Where we go, others will follow. The connection between runnability and livability is so clear (at least to me), that it's surprising that new developments consistently leave pathways out of the plans.
Don KardongLike the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited; if the Romans consulted the heavens for guidance in this effort, the city fathers of New York consulted the banks.
Richard SennettCity planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.
Murray BookchinA city is a state - of mind, of taste, of opportunity. A city is a marketplace - where ideas are traded, opinions clash and eternal conflict may produce eternal truths.
Herb CaenA man should never wear shorts in the city. Flip-flops and shorts in the city are never appropriate. Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.
Tom FordIt is my plan to create a city that is direct and simple... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it.
Addison MiznerWinter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome -- black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds
Barack ObamaI think Sin City is a good example. Nobody would accuse Sin City of being historically inaccurate because it takes place in modern times.
Zack SnyderWell, at this point, it looks like the Iraqi forces are moving into the city center itself. Now they've been working on this for seven months now. The American military's been pushing them and encouraging them to really get into the city and rout ISIS. So now they're finally doing it.
Tom BowmanI thought of New York as a free city, like one of those prewar nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions. I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.
Luc SanteSomething will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.
Richard FordI never really lived outside of the city growing up, but I'm always looking in between the lines of the city, and I magnetize over to the green spots.
FeistThere's such a freewheeling nature to 'Second City,' and the greatest thing about 'Second City' was having a sophisticated audience night after night who appreciated what it was. They knew it wasn't all going to be great when you improvised, so they were very forgiving that way.
Steve CarellWhen we started out, we didn't really think that the era of great opportunity would end one day. We were much too busy developing our companies. But in today's China you can build a city, even a mega-city like Beijing or Shanghai, within 10 or 15 years. And then you are done. So in real estate development, the Grรผnderzeit is over. But that is not the case in other sectors.
Zhang XinThe right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
David HarveyI went to really good New York City public schools that had arts programs. So in junior high, I got into the drama department. From there, I went to a performing arts high school in New York City called Laguardia and I just kind of fell into the professional side by happenstance.
Merritt WeverThey have no allegiance to Atlantic City whatsoever, other than nostalgia, and that doesn't pay the bills, ... The Miss America pageant has to do what it thinks best serves its interests, and if moving out of Atlantic City does, that's what it should do.
Leonard HornThere's only one movie theater in the entire city of Detroit. The entire city has one open movie theater, and it is in the - it is in the General Motors headquarters complex.
Michael MooreThere is always going to something very grounded about the characters I play, because of my Chicago roots, because the city is so grounded. Even my wife pointed it out when we were in the city, she said that even the architecture is grounded in Chicago, it's so solid. Because it has to deal with winters. There is something about Chicago that keeps people centered and grounded.
Jake M. JohnsonA man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason
Hugo GrotiusIt's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans.
Ray NaginIt was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V. S. NaipaulIf New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.
Paul BeattyEach neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Teju ColeHong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene.
InvaderAlmost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.
John McPheeAny city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.
PlatoIt is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.
Michel de CerteauLondon is a great city full of amazing people from all backgrounds and when Londoners face adversity, we always pull together. We stand up for our values. And we show the world. We are the greatest city in the world.
Sadiq KhanYou know I have been issued a public urination pass by the city because of my condition. Unfortunately, my little brother ran out of the house with it this morning. Him and his friends are probably peeing all over the city.
Jerry SeinfeldSaigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.
James FentonMy favorite place in L.A. is Manhattan Beach. It's an intimate, friendly little beachside city within a city-smaller than most of its neighbors, so it reminds me of a British seaside resort. If my three teenage sons are in town, we'll play some cricket on the flat, hard sand where the water breaks, just to really confuse the locals!
Piers MorganI'm practically broke and homeless. This fatal city, Antioch, has devoured all my money: this fatal city with its extravagant life.
C.P. CavafyWomen are smart in business and dumb in love. They won't date outside their zip code, let alone outside the city. They are city snobs.
Patti StangerSo I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.
Kurt VonnegutCaen's San Francisco may not be the city we remember, but it is the city we want to remember.
Willie BrownMy belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences.
James BuchanAs a lover of New York, I hope New York remains as successful as a city, even though the very groups on whom the city depends - like artists - are not finding it easy to stay here. That's what it's been about, really, since the 1980s. You can kind of see that coming in the 1980s even though the rents were ridiculously low compared to what the rents are now.
Sharon Zukin