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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"probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. how well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. she was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that"
"Touring is very routine. You get to the city, you go to the hotel, you got to be at the hotel by a certain time - it's very routine. I'm not a very structured person, so when I get some structure, it's cool; it's good for me."
"The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there."
"When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city..."
"My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City."
"The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers."
"Los Angeles: Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city."
"The sun,--the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man--burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray."
"San Francisco is one of my favourite cities in the world...I would probably rank it at the top or near the top. It's small but photogenic and has layers...You never have problems finding great angles that people have never done."
"Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege."
"I think you can tell when a New York show isn't shot in the city. It's so iconic and has such a specific energy."
"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe."
"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."
"LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; NY gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle."
"There was no need to inform us of the protocol involved. We were from Chicago and knew all about cement."
"The way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left."
"Faith should be pulled into the public arena when it affects how we live. If it doesn't, it does no earthly good. What does my faith say about the fact that a girl can't be a nuclear physicist because she's black and from the inner city? My faith says, no, that's not what God intended. It pulls it back into the public arena the idea that there's got to be something fair for all of us."
"We've seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants - farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe."
"New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn't even sit down, and not just because there is no room."
"Pray five times a day for peace. Peace in your life, peace in your spirit, peace in your family, peace in your community, in your city but most importantly peace in this world."
