I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.
—Michelangelo Antonioni, 1967Quotes
Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.
—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969Every 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, 1987No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly, 1944The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.
—Thucydides, 410 BCThe country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there.
—Édouard Manet, c. 1860Cities are the abyss of the human species.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762Great 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 seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.
—Susanne K. Langer, 1962Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D.H. Lawrence, 1908There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.
—Kathleen Norris, 1931A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley, 1934