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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"Actual plans for how we help the economy, how we help the environment, how we help [deal with] violence in our cities. These are things that Hillary Clinton has always brought the conversation back to, when he's gone vulgar and he's gone low."
"That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else."
"I never will let anyone make, maneuver me into making a distinction between the Mississippi form of discrimination and the New York City form of discrimination. It's, it's both discrimination; it's all discrimination."
"More so than any other city on the African continent, the people of Cairo look like the American Negroes in the sense that we have all complexions, we range in America from the darkest black to the lightest light, and here in Cairo it is the same thing; throughout Egypt, it is the same thing. All of the complexions are blended together here in a truly harmonious society."
"You can't fight City Hall. It keeps changing its name."
"I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow."
"I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city."
"And leaning out the window, enjoying the day above the varying volume of the entire city, only one thought swells my soul – the intimate will to die, to finish, not to see more light over any city, not to think, not to feel, to leave behind like wrapping paper the course of the sun and the days, to rid myself, at the edge of the grand bed, as of a heavy suit, of the involuntary effort to be."
"St. Paul's Loomed like a bubble o'er the town."
"Never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London ... it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result."
"How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!"
"The government burns down whole cities while the people are forbidden to light lamps."
"I don't go on tour tours, I just go randomly to cities to do shows if I have an opening in my schedule."
"The reason I took Early Edition - besides the fact that I liked it - was that it enabled me to start a production company in New York City. It's a low-budget film company to produce and direct movies."
"Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book - literally. Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination."
"Los Angeles is a large city-like area surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel."
"Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here."
"I have a double policy, which would also solve immigration: I would stand at the border of New York City and I would say, "You can come here to live, but you can't come here to visit.""
"London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay."
"So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams."
