Explore Quotes on Cities

I was in Nauvoo on the 26th of May, 1846, for the last time, and left the city of the Saints feeling that most likely I was taking a final farewell of Nauvoo for this life. I looked upon the temple and city as they receded from view and asked the Lord to remember the sacrifices of His Saints.

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

Of all the peoples whom I have studied, from city dwellers to cliff dwellers, I always find that at least 50 percent would prefer to have at least one jungle between themselves and their mothers-in-law.

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.

Even on a personal note, my dressing table downstairs is crowded with things, like a mini landscape. It's a city with buildings and towers and roads. There's a pool and a little park. When I move something around it becomes a different tableau.

The design of a dress, furniture, a house, a room, a street and a city are all the same process.

I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed.

A Mediterranean city is really my culture.

If you go to a big city anywhere in the world and you need a doctor, just ask me. I can tell you who's good and who's bad. I've even considered writing a guidebook.

And the Arabs are the biggest owners now of media in the United States, okay, and over stock exchanges. And in many major U.S. cities they’re the majority owners.

People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in Moscow or Beijing or Baghdad or Kabul. People risk their lives to come here---to New York. The greatest city in the world, where dreams become reality.

The people must fight on behalf of the law as though for the city wall.

We must start... rebuilding our cities around energy efficiency and human needs, rather than around the car and wasted energy.

We as mayors have the opportunity to push the envelope and get people thinking, even when it is not politically popular. Cities hold the key.

Start locally and build. Start small and grow. Start in your house, then move to your school, your book club, your gym, your church, your temple, your city.

On our current path, all our great Gulf and Atlantic coast cities are at risk of meeting the same fate as New Orleans.

If our government won't spend the money to protect New Orleans sufficiently today, what are the chances we will spend the money to protect dozens of coastal cities post-2050, once everyone knows that sea levels will keep rising and intense hurricanes will occur relentlessly?