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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"The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods."
"The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically."
"I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still."
"Oh well, maybe the only beauty left in cities is in the oil slicks on the road and maybe there isn't any beauty left in the people who live in these places."
"Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities."
"I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. l might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents."
"Vancouver's a very child friendly city, there's... no doubt about that."
"Surely there never was so evil a thing as money, which maketh cities into ruinous heaps, and banisheth men from their houses, and turneth their thoughts from good unto evil."
"One must obey the man whom the city sets up in power in small things and in justice and in its opposite."
"I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them."
"Right now a lot of people are still choosing to go to Toronto instead of shooting in New York City, something I haven't done and something I hope I'll never have to do."
"Everything that would be said against the Eixample's heirs, from Le Corbusier's 'ville radieuse' to Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia, was already said, with far less justice, about the Eixample itself. And all its critics concurred that the basic mistake was to have left the planning of a city in the hands of a socialist."
"Maybe there would be a Tinker city someday, too. They would buy up all of the colored dye, and everyone else in the world would ave to wear brown.' -Mat"
"(The city is being) destroyed by thugs who in a very senseless way are trying to tear down what so many have fought for, tearing down businesses, tearing down or destroying property, things that we know will impact our community for years."
"As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference."
"May every day be a new beginning, and every dawn bring us closer to that shining city upon a hill."
"America is, and always will be, a shining city on a hill."
"Publications such as Forbes and Fortune continually rank Georgia cities as among the best places to live, work and run a business."
"In these days of intellectual awakening and steadily asserting public opinion, the holy places of the Hindus, their condition, and method of work have not escaped tile keen eye of criticism; and this city, being the holy of holies to all Hindus, has not failed to attract its full share of censure."
"Training and working in Philadelphia is a very unusual situation because that city does believe that Rocky is real. No one calls me Sylvester, it's Rocky."
