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
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
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
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
Cities force growth, and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
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
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
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
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
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
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
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
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening…
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.
—Desmond Morris (b.1928) English Ethologist, Writer
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
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
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
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
I’ve been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this: If you’ve seen one city slum you’ve seen them all.
—Spiro Agnew (1918–96) American Politician, Vice President
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
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
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
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
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 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
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
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 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
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
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