Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay … a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
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
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, Journalist
The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.
—Jay Leno (b.1950) American Comedian, TV Personality
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
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62) American Sociologist, Academic
City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
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
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
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German Literary and Marxist Critic
Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.
—Daniel Webster (1782–1852) American Statesman, Lawyer
All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
—Tacitus (56–117) Roman Orator, Historian
Washington is a place where politicians don’t know which way is up and taxes don’t know which way is down.
—Robert Orben (1927–2023) American Humorist, Speechwriter
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 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
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 city is an epitome of the social world.—All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues.—It contains the products of every moral zone and is cosmopolitan, not only in a national, but in a moral and spiritual sense.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–80) American Preacher, Poet
If you’re not in New York, you’re camping out.
—Thomas E. Dewey (1902–71) American Politician, Lawyer
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
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
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
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
The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
—Desmond Morris (b.1928) English Ethologist, Writer
The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist
Men, by associating in large masses, as in camps and cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds, but weaken their morals; thus a retrocession in the one, is too often the price they pay for a refinement of the other.
—Charles Caleb Colton (c.1780–1832) English Clergyman, Aphorist
Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. On Washington D. C.
—Frank Lane (1896–1981) American Sportsperson, Businessperson
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