The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.
—Edward Hoagland (b.1932) American Essayist, Novelist
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
—Albert Camus (1913–60) Algerian-born French Philosopher, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist, Author
There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American Head of State, Military Leader
If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.
—Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French Poet, Politician, Historian
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
—Thomas Wolfe (1900–38) American Novelist
Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. On Washington D. C.
—Frank Lane (1896–1981) American Sportsperson, Businessperson
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
—Desmond Morris (b.1928) English Ethologist, Writer
There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.
—Edward Hoagland (b.1932) American Essayist, Novelist
When a village ceases to be a community, it becomes oppressive in its narrow conformity. So one becomes an individual and migrates to the city. There, finding others like-minded, one re-establishes a village community. Nowadays only New Yorkers are yokels.
—Paul Goodman (1911–72) American Novelist, Essayist
The city is recruited from the country.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital… not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
—Don Herold (1889–1966) American Humorist, Writer, Illustrator, Cartoonist
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
All things may be bought in Rome with money.
—Juvenal (c.60–c.136 CE) Roman Poet
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
—Michelangelo (1475–1564) Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Poet, Engineer
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
New York now leads the world’s great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn’t make a sudden move.
—David Letterman (b.1947) American TV Personality, Comedian
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Either these unsaved people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.
—Dwight L. Moody (1837–99) Christian Religious Leader, Publisher
The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.
—Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish Poet
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.
—Hubert Humphrey (1911–78) American Head of State, Politician
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.
—Italian Proverb
Any 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.
—Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
I have found by experience, that they who have spent all their lives in cities, contract not only an effeminacy of habit, but of thinking.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
Commuter—one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster (1879–1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
What else can you expect from a town that’s shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?
—O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862–1910) American Writer of Short Stories
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.
—Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British Historian
We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
—Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar
We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
If you suppress the exorbitant love of pleasure and money, idle curiosity, iniquitous purpose, and wanton mirth, what a stillness would there be in the greatest cities.
—Jean de La Bruyere (1645–96) French Satiric Moralist, Author
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian Poet
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist