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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"...one Greek city state had a fundamental law: anyone proposing revisions to the constitution did so with a noose around his neck. If his proposal lost he was instantly hanged."
"And blind oblivion swallowed cities up."
"The Heavenly City outshines Rome beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity."
"I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine."
"Let every man shovel out his own snow and the whole city will be passable."
"The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry."
"We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night."
"Australia as a nation, as a set of cities and some regional centres, that project died a death and we didn't get it up, but I still think there's merit in that."
"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque."
"America always put forth this phony melting pot theory, but it's a reality now. They couldn't accomplish the melting pot economically; they couldn't accomplish it politically, or through education and science. But America has become a consumer society, and I see young people in the cities - of all colors and races - hanging out together over consumerism."
"But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce."
"Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries."
"The Marquis sighed. "I thought it was just a legend," he said. "Like the alligators in the sewers of New York City." Old Bailey nodded, sagely: "What, the big white buggers? They're down there. I had a friend lost a head to one of them." A moment of silence. Old Naeiley handed the statue back to the Marquis. Then he raised his hand, and snapped it, like a crocodile hand, at the Carabas. "It was OK," gurned Old Bailey with a grin that was most terrible to behold. "He had another."
"But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love."
"The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy."
"BMX riding breaks down racial perceptions. Coming from New York City and being a BMX rider, that isn't something that's too common. I feel like for the longest time, I would ride through certain neighborhoods and people would call me a "white boy" because they associated white boys from California with BMX riding, and it bugs me so much because I'm completely not that. I completely don't fit that mold. It's really important for me to bring BMX riding to the masses and show people exactly what it is."
"Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles."
"I've been to every park in every city and not seen a statue to a committee."
"The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi."
"I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."
