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Quotes

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

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

—Kathleen Norris, 1931

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

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

—Philip K. Dick, 1972

One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.

—Ernst Jünger, 1977

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

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

—Édouard Manet, c. 1860

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