Archive

Quotes

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

—D.H. Lawrence, 1908

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

—Ernst Jünger, 1977

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

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992

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

—Aldous Huxley, 1934

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

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

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

—Marcus Terentius Varro, c. 70 BC

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

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

—Thucydides, 410 BC

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

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

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

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