Wherever commerce prevails there will be an inequality of wealth, and wherever the latter does a simplicity of manners must decline.
—James Madison, 1783
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The period is not very remote when the benefits of a liberal and free commerce will, pretty generally, succeed to the devastations and horrors of war.
—George Washington, 1786No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.
—Cyril Connolly, 1944What is the city but the people?
—William Shakespeare, 1608There’s plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.
—Sylvia Alice Earle, 1995What timid man does not avoid contact with the sick, fearing lest he contract a disease so near?
—Ovid, c. 10Civilization, a much-abused word, stands for a high matter quite apart from telephones and electric lights.
—Edith Hamilton, 1930Any 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 BCIf I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.
—John Donne, 1623Time is a veil interposed between God and ourselves, as our eyelid is between our eye and the light.
—François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1820O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1599To hold a throne is luck; to bestow it, virtue.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 45One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
—George Santayana, c. 1914