Every 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, 1987Quotes
There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.
—Kathleen Norris, 1931Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.
—Marcus Terentius Varro, c. 70 BCTowns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D.H. Lawrence, 1908The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1962What is the city but the people?
—William Shakespeare, 1608It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.
—Thucydides, 410 BCIn 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, 1990There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.
—Rumi, c. 1250Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?
—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.
—Benito Mussolini, 1929Great 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, 1868