"Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders."
Read quote
23 likes
Cities quotes
Cities
4.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Cities
Browse quotes that often appear alongside cities — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Cities quotes (page 7 of 237)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric moved: To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I shall endure. All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
Read quote
23 likes
"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"
Read quote
23 likes
"Those who refuse to support and defend the state have no claim to protection by that state. Killing an anarchist or a pacifist should not be considered "murder" in a legalistic sense. The offense against the state, if any, should be "Using deadly weapons within city limits," or "Creating a traffic hazard," or other misdemeanor."
Read quote
23 likes
"Chicago is one city. We shall work as one people for our common good and our common goals."
Read quote
23 likes
"Arab sovereignty in Jerusalem just cannot be. This city will not be divided - not half and half, not 60-40, not 75-25, nothing."
Read quote
23 likes
"Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror."
Read quote
22 likes
"Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is."
Read quote
22 likes
"Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers."
Read quote
22 likes
"A battering ram can knock down a city wall, but it cannot stop a hole. Different things have different uses."
Read quote
22 likes
"But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins."
Read quote
22 likes
"Vehement silhouettes of Manhattan - that vertical city with unimaginable diamonds."
Read quote
22 likes
"For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying 'lepers' we would understand 'outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.' But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign."
Read quote
21 likes
"Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port."
Read quote
21 likes
"Environmental damage such as graffiti, fly-posting and general littering is a menace that is becoming all too prevalent, not just in inner cities but in many communities - urban and rural."
Read quote
21 likes
"Water, water, water....There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be."
Read quote
20 likes
"Virtue cannot dwell with wealth either in a city or in a house."
Read quote
20 likes
"The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world."
Read quote
20 likes
"The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families."
Read quote
20 likes
"I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently."
Read quote
20 likes