Cities Quotes - Page 29

• An evening up on the Empire State roof-the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the 84th floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York-a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city-and it looks adagio down there.

  Dawn Powell

  New York, Garden, Feet

  Dawn Powell (1998). “The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965”, Zoland Books

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• To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.

  George Steiner

  Trying, Praxis, Opposing

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• The person who renders loyal service in a humble capacity will be chosen for higher responsibilities, just as the biblical servant who multiplied the one pound given him by his master was made ruler over ten cities.

  B. C. Forbes

  Humble, Responsibility, Biblical

  B. C. Forbes (2005). “Keys to Success”, p.120, Lulu.com

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• Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Wall, Distance, Rocks

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.68, Penguin

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• Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Garden, Vegas, Oasis

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• My quality of life here in Quebec City is extraordinary.

  Patrick Roy

  Quality, Quebec, Extraordinary

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• You stand now between anarchy and law. The Police have done their duty. Let the jury have the same courage so that the police can indeed rest in peace. The flowers of spring shall bloom upon their graves moistened by the tears of a great city. Outraged and violated law shall be redeemed and in their martyrdom anarchy shall be buried forever.

  Jason Epstein

  Rest In Peace, Spring, Flower

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• Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

  Renata Adler

  Love You, Sleep, Insomnia

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.7, New York Review of Books

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• Sure, it was terrible and all, but you have to ask yourself: If the whole city was flooded, why couldn't they just swim to safety?

  Zach Braff

  Safety, Swim, Terrible

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• I had been in so many towns and cities in America with John Kennedy, but I was not with him in Dallas, Texas, on November 21, 1963.

  Pierre Salinger

  Texas, America, Dallas

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• Well, it was one of my most gratifying experiences because I could devote my knowledge and my talent for the good for the City of Washington, and all the Federal projects where the Fine Arts Commission had jurisdiction, and it was a tremendous experience.

  Felix de Weldon

  Art, Experience, Talent

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• The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis

  Henry Mayhew

  Wall, Space, Acres

  Henry Mayhew (2016). “The Morning Chronicle Survey of Labour and the Poor: The Metropolitan Districts”, p.42, Routledge

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• Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.

  Jacques Ellul

  Mean, Night, Men

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• To discover a city is in itself a unique event, but when we have the privilege of sharing it with friends most dear to us, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  Reinaldo Arenas

  Unique, Events, Once In A Lifetime

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• Since the 1950s (until the early 1990s), girls in Kabul and other cities attended schools. Half of university students were women, and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants. A small number of women even held important political posts as members of Parliament and judges. Most women did not wear the burqa.

  Eleanor Smeal

  Girl, Teacher, School

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• You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.

  Bill Bryson

  Couple, Islands, Europe

  Bill Bryson (1989). “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America”, p.15, VNR AG

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• If we can develop and design streets so that they are wonderful, fulfilling places to be - community-building places, attractive for all people - then we will have successfully designed about one-third of the city directly and will have had an immense impact on the rest.

  Allan Jacobs

  Impact, People, Design

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• No great city has ever been known for its abundant supply of parking.

  Allan Jacobs

  Parking, Great Cities, Known

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• For starters, Portland isn't a great city to live in if you're a young, African American male with a lot of money.

  Greg Oden

  African American, Portland, Males

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• This city can be kind of brutal, so you see your dreams from every different angle, but ultimately it's about acting and if you enjoy acting, you will always enjoy acting.

  Radha Mitchell

  Dream, Acting, Different

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• Everyone, including the Athenians [...] are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all.

  Protagoras

  Advice, Excellence, Accepting

  "Protagoras". Book by Plato, Oxford University Press, p. 19, 2002.

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• They have no allegiance to Atlantic City whatsoever, other than nostalgia, and that doesn't pay the bills, ... The Miss America pageant has to do what it thinks best serves its interests, and if moving out of Atlantic City does, that's what it should do.

  Leonard Horn

  Moving, Thinking, America

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• By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

  Socrates

  Community, Urban, Planning

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• The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Crazy, Race, Outcomes

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• Among the noblest in the land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Men, Vegetarianism, Land

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “My Complete Poetical Works (Annotated Edition)”, p.665, Jazzybee Verlag

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