Cities quotes
4.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside cities — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"There is such a desire to give everybody a piece, we're probably wasting a great deal of homeland security money trying to be politically correct, when we really need to make sure that our cities get the money they need."
"The Secular City, having legislated and litigated itself out of any entanglement with the City of God, would be a hell upon earth ."
"And if the City falls and one survives he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile he shall be the City"
"I would have things as they were in all the days of my life, and in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard's pupil."
"I cannot watch the city of Chicago be destroyed by petty politics and bad government."
"Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their subjects, others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions...Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia [an Italian city] by factions and Pisa by fortress, and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily."
"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."
"Cities are the sinks of the human race."
"You know what's funny is that I have this ongoing relationship with the city of Washington D.C. I went to George Washington University, and my nickname was K-Dub - based on G-Dub - and I'm now on the board of trustees at George Washington University."
"In the 10 cities with the nation's highest obesity rates, the direct costs connected with obesity and obesity-related diseases are roughly $50 million per 100,000 residents. And if these 10 cities just cut their obesity rates down to the national average, all added up they combine to save nearly $500 million in healthcare costs each year."
"Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life."
"The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other."
"I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
"Being born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in the very rural parts of Kansas led me to believe that everything was simple, everything made sense and that anything was possible."
"There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy."
"When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not."
"The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was ablaze with scarlet umbrellas."
"The clergyman who lives in the city may have piety, but he must have taste."
"This is different than every other Ebola situation we've ever had. It's spreading widely, throughout entire countries, through multiple countries, in cities and very fast."
"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."
