By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.
—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BCQuotes
It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.
—Thucydides, 410 BCNo city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly, 1944In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.
—Simon Hoggart, 1990One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.
—Ernst Jünger, 1977Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
—John Berger, 1987Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.
—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.
—Édouard Manet, c. 1860There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.
—Kathleen Norris, 1931I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
—Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
—Hesiod, c. 700 BCA hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.
—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935