Quotes About City

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

On numerous visits to Manhattan, I have found myself poking around the city trying to find a moment of quiet and once located a hint of it in Central Park during a windless, late-night snowfall. There I stood absolutely still in the lemon glow of the city, a sky full of snow. The city still roared from all sides, a thousand noises compressed down to just one. I counted that distant, mild roar as quiet, a welcome relief from the more pressing noises of the daytime city.

There are a lot of car bombs and roadside bombs, house bombs, even, in this city planted by ISIS. So - but it's going to be a tough fight ahead, and the Iraqi generals expect to take the city back, the city of Ramadi, by mid-January.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

Walkers 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.

So 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.

I dreamed in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; I dreamed that was the new City of Friends; Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest; It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

We should not call a city happy because it attracts masses of citizens from everywhere; a fortunate city is one in which the race of the original inhabitants is best preserved.

We're resolved tonight that young Americans will always see those Potomac lights, that they will always find here a city of hope in a country that's free so that when other generations look back at this conservative era in American politics and our time in power, they'll say of us that we did hold true to that dream of Joseph Winthrop and Joseph Warren, that we did keep faith with our God, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.

TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-ward resumes its liberty.

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

A 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.

For Beirut it was the civil war, and the dividing of the city - which is something that is shared among Beirut, Berlin and Baghdad. And Cairo is a city that has a scar that was born after many decades of dictatorship - oppression shaped the people's lives, and forced people to grow up accompanied by fear. I belong to a generation that, whether we like it or not, was shaped by this fear of death or loosing the people you love, the threat of war, not allowed to be yourself, forced to be silent - as you watch ignorance occupying everything around you. And this is a deep scar.

There is such a cool vibe in Nashville. It is has the excitement of a big city, but also has this amazing small town feel. I have definitely come to call it my home, and have my favorite go-to spots. But most of all it's the people. The southern charm, and hospitality. And some great shopping never hurts. As fun as Music City is during the day, the real magic happens at night ... The lights, the energy, the music, how could you not love this town?

And leaning out the window, enjoying the day above the varying volume of the entire city, only one thought swells my soul – the intimate will to die, to finish, not to see more light over any city, not to think, not to feel, to leave behind like wrapping paper the course of the sun and the days, to rid myself, at the edge of the grand bed, as of a heavy suit, of the involuntary effort to be.

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.

When you work from city to city or country to country, you work the same way; the working method is the same.

I miss New York terribly. There is no place like the city. I miss people-watching. I miss the nightlife. I miss the food. There are so many options in New York City.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

I grew up in Chicago and was a huge fan of 'The Second City', so when I moved to L.A., I was looking for anything that resembled that... then I started 'The Groundlings', so I went to a show and it was very much like 'Second City'. I was so impressed that that same night I went backstage and I went up to the funniest person there.

New York city is full of great spaces. The best spaces of the world are here. This is the new Europe, where the settlers came and busted out their ideas and put it down so there's nothing but great space in this great city.

I was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. As you know, there are twelve banks and they have their citizens board, and I got elected to the Fed Chairmanship for the Federal Reserve Kansas City Bank back in the mid-'90s. It might have been 1995-'96.

Something 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.

The most important part of a city is its people. In fact, people for me are like little cities. When you meet someone, it's like you've found a new city to explore. You take a tram, visit the museums and operas and cafes.

People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city.

You just let your lower self go, and then it takes on all these aspects of the society - the city with horns blowing, the people yelling things at each other, and the all-in-all violence and chaos of the city. Put that on stage with music, and that's what this is.

Touring is very grueling. It's very taxing on the body and living out of your suitcase, going from city to city, night after night. It's a tough job.

I think everyone should live in New York City if they ever get the chance at least once in their life. It's such a great place to live; there's a different energy about living in the city.

Mumbai may not be my city. But it is my kind of city.

In Riyadh, there's going to be a huge project that will house at least 12,000 units with inhabitants of approximately 150,000 people. It's like a city within a city.

Cities 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.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

I grew up in the Midwest, so I have sort of an honorable moral code. But I moved to a city and joined a sort of fast crowd. A lot of people who grew up in the city sort of arent aware of manners and other ways of life and common decency.

I love San Francisco so much. I call it the Emerald City and have been coming here since 1992. I have a few old friends that live here, and my aunt and uncle live in Oakland. I think it's a magical city - it's big, sexy and very 'cosmo' with a small-town feel.

Daily absorption in the physical actualities of nature is life as I need it to be: it means I am connected to such large things - sky, sea, hill, the vagaries of weather, the undeniable needs of animals - that I can disappear as a subject of interest, I can exist without self-consciousness. The city is a challenge for me, however thrilling a few days prove, for its insatiable overstimulation and the rarity of quiet. The city makes people bigger than they need to be.

I'd say my style is all me, It's different from other artist even in my city or outside of my city.

It'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.

It 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.

I was in Mexico City. It's a very pleasant city in many ways. It's vibrant, lively, pretty exciting society, but also depressing in other ways, and sometimes almost hopeless, you know. So it's a combination of vibrancy and, I wouldn't say despair, but hopelessness, you know. Doesn't have to be, but it is. I mean, there is almost no economy.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

I go down the street, I say hello to everybody, a stranger or otherwise. I know that they do not know me, but I like to say hello and I think they appreciate it. I notice their faces light up with a smile and I believe that if all the people in our great city...would do that, the whole world would begin to say it is the "Friendly City." You can do a tremendous thing here. We get so absorbed, we do not always speak to our friends. Speak to them, even strangers, you are not going to give offense.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

I think in rural settings, people have a different appreciation for animals than might the city dweller. In parts of India where poisonous snake bite is common, people have a much different value system. I live in a city. I'm not thinking about wolves, lions, etc.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

The first seastead happened fifteen centuries ago. The result was the most beautiful city in the world, Venice. People who were sick of their violent governments fled to the water, where they built civilization on stilts. That startup society - a free city-state on the water - became so successful it dominated the Mediterranean for a thousand years.

It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.