Archive

Quotes

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

—Thucydides, 410 BC

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

—Wallace Stevens, 1952

We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

—John Winthrop, 1630

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.

—Marcus Terentius Varro, c. 70 BC

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1962

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk happy.

—Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. 

—Édouard Manet, c. 1860

In 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, 1990

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

—Cyril Connolly, 1944

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

—Plato, c. 378 BC

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992