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've sucked way too much cement for this year. Bad juju rising off them city sidewalks. I need to babble with a brook or two, inhale starlight, make friends with some trees."
"Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees."
"A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times."
"I'm the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It's a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don't like - and the fact that it's not reversible."
"I think perhaps it is a generational thing. I talk to younger people and they say, Where is this melancholy city you talk about My Istanbul is a sunny place."
"Right now, in every big city ghetto, tens of thousands of yesterday's and today's school dropouts are keeping body and soul together by some form of hustling in the same way I did."
"Business as usual will not be accepted by any part of this city."
"Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar."
"I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city."
"The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients."
"You should be allowed to be a modern city dweller and still care about the environment."
"Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great."
"The City of New York is like an enormous citadel, a modern Carcassonne. Walking between the magnificent skyscrapers one feels the presence on the fringe of a howling, raging mob, a mob with empty bellies, a mob unshaven and in rags."
"I am my city. Nobody from my city wants to hear about my city."
"Who knows if the moon's / a balloon, coming out of a keen city / in the sky - filled with pretty people?"
"One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world."
"When the music changes, the walls of the city shake."
"From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation"
"The stars begin to fade like guttering candles and are snuffed out one by one. Out in the depths of space the great celestial cities, the galaxies cluttered with the memorabilia of ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass in the growing darkness ... of a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard."
"The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city."
