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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"I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival."
"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."
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man."
"New York is the last true city."
"By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities."
"Don't let the wicked city get you down."
"The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets."
"Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it; for such a city may always justify rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions."
"The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals."
"Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent."
"I don't know if high society is different in other cities, but in Hollywood, important people can't stand to be invited someplace that isn't full of other important people. They don't mind a few unfamous people being present because they make good listeners."
"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."
"The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city."
"I mean, just because you're a musician doesn't mean all your ideas are about music. So every once in a while I get an idea about plumbing, I get an idea about city government, and they come the way they come."
"The beauty of any city is really the people within it and the people that you're close to."
"I'm a staple in my city, you can never ruin me."
"There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home."
"New York City is a mismanaged carnival of stupidity that is desperate for revenue and anxious to criminalize behavior once thought benign."
"Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy."
"Two loves have made two different cities: self-love hath made a terrestrial city, which rises in contempt of God; and Divine Love hath made a celestial one, which rises in contempt of self. The former glories in itself - the latter in God."
