Archive

Quotes

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

—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

—Aldous Huxley, 1934

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

—Kathleen Norris, 1931

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

—Susanne K. Langer, 1962

Just 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, 1903

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

—Euripides, c. 415 BC

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

—Hesiod, c. 700 BC

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

—Ernst Jünger, 1977

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

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

—Cyril Connolly, 1944

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

—Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967

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

—Édouard Manet, c. 1860

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

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992