A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
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
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
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
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
The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
—Desmond Morris (b.1928) English Ethologist, Writer
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
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, Novelist
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 fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
—Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American Biographer, Novelist, Socialist
All great art is born of the metropolis.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
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
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) Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
—Tacitus (56–117) Roman Orator, Historian
No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
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
New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.
—Johnny Carson (1925–2005) American Comedian
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
—Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American Novelist, Editor, Academic
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
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) American Short-story Writer, 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
An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
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
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
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Satirist, Short Story Writer
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
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
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