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
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
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
A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
Cities are … distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
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
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 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
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
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
New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.
—Johnny Carson (1925–2005) American Comedian
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist—this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul—a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
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
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
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
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
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
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
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
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
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
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
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
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
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
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