Quotes on Cities

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.

What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others... Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.

But they who give straight judgements to strangers and to those of the land and do not transgress what is just, for them the city flourishes and its people prosper.

Who knows if the moon's / a balloon, coming out of a keen city / in the sky - filled with pretty people?

All things began in Order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again, according to the Ordainer of Order, and the mystical mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

I'm like thousands of women in South Africa who lost their men to cities and prisons... I stand defiant, tall and strong.

This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

And if the City falls and one survives _x000D_ he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile _x000D_ he shall be the City

He liked the fact that Venice had no cars. It made the city human. The streets were like veins, he thought, and the people were the blood, circulating everywhere.

A city with one newspaper... is like a man with one eye, and often the eye is glass.

I am the passenger, I stay under glass. I look through my window so bright, I see the stars come out tonight. I see the bright and hollow sky, over the city's ripped backsides and everything looks good tonight.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

It was when I realised I had a new nationality: I was in exile. I am an adulterous resident: when I am in one city, I am dreaming of the other. I am an exile; citizen of the country of longing.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

I see this rise in rough sleeping and homelessness - in one of the wealthiest cities in the world - as a growing source of shame. And as Londoners, as a city, and as a country, I believe we have a moral duty to tackle it head-on.