Cities quotes
4.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside cities — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Sometimes you want to go for a walk and you don't want to be watched. You just want to be anonymous and blend in. Especially when I travel, I feel that way, because I can't really go out and see a city the way other people can and I miss out on a lot."
"Today the cities dominate and drain the villages so that they are crumbling to ruin."
"Khaddar is an attempt to revise and reverse the process and establish a better relationship between the cities and villages."
"Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?"
"And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City."
"I been all around the world and I haven't found a city that I'd rather be from or rather come back to than Los Angeles."
"Desire is making people build ships and cities, has made men conquer nations... and it can defeat that nicotine"
"Only the highway of useful service leads to the city of happiness."
"A city without books, a city without a library is like a graveyard."
"Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other."
"New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from."
"She never imagined a scenario in which her love was not returned with the same depth of feeling, for to her it was impossible to believe that a love of such magnitude could have stunned only her. The most elementary logic and justice indicated that somewhere in the city he was suffering the same delicious torment."
"Why can't a state that launches cosmonauts into space provide enough eggs and milk for its city children during the winter months?"
"You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient."
"We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create from - from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy, meaning all of those bad things that we feel are engulfing us."
"To strengthen the grassroots at the party - at the party unit, at the county level, at the precinct level, and then to help motivate and facilitate the local grassroots to get out there and turn out the vote and boost turn out. And then to help govern in places where we do hold city councils and state legislatures."
"A City that parlies is half gotten. [A city that parleys is half gotten.]"
"I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you."
"The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible."
"Major cities are divided into two parts; the bits that are in the guidebook and the bits that aren't. If you don't take a guidebook, you'll see a different city."
