Cities Quotes - Page 39

• I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

  Smedley Butler

  Brother, Wall, Boys

  "War Is a Racket". Smedley Butler's speech in the U.S. (1933); later published as a book "War Is a Racket", www.businessinsider.com. 1935.

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• There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

  Don Herold

  New York, Sophistication, City Life

  Don Herold (1926). “There ought to be a law--”

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• A trait which differentiated New York from European cities was the incredible freedom and ease in which life, including sexual life, could be carried on, on many levels.

  Jerzy Kosinski

  New York, Europe, Literature

  Jerzy Kosinski (2012). “Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller: Kosinski as Storyteller”, p.269, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• To sit on the front steps — whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city — and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.

  Harvey Milk

  Believe, Color, Important

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• You know what I like about San Francisco? The women are beautiful, fashionable and smart. San Francisco is one of the only cities I like to visit. I love New York and Chicago - I studied there, and L.A. has the same people as New York.

  LeRoy Neiman

  Beautiful, New York, Smart

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• My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City.

  Philip Morrison

  New York, Pieces, World

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• I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute; but I know how to raise a small and obscure city to glory and greatness...whereto all kindreds of the earth will pilgrim.

  Themistocles

  Greatness, Play, Tunes

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• Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Distance, Men, Museums

  Elizabeth Kolbert (2014). “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History”, p.64, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• From a business perspective, the question related to cities and sustainability is clear and compelling: can you have a healthy company in an unhealthy city? Arguably, no. Companies need healthy cities to provide reliable infrastructure, an educated and vital workforce, a vibrant economy, and a safe and secure environment to survive and thrive. Business executives have a lot to learn from cities, and a lot to contribute, and this book shows the way, chronicling the successes and the lessons learned about what it takes to make a city healthy, in every sense of the word.

  Joel Makower

  Book, Perspective, Healthy

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• Dodge City is one town where the average bad man of the West not only finds his equal, but finds himself badly handicapped.

  Andy Adams

  Men, Average, West

  Andy Adams (2013). “Complete Western Collection”, p.99, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Most people work fifty weeks a year so they can do this the other 2. Well the smart ones live in a ski resort, where the boss lets them have powder snow days off. And almost forty feet of snow falls every winter thats a lot of days off. A lot of doing what you moved here to do. Most major ski resorts are now so big that regardles of what kind ofjob you have in a city there's probably a job almost exactly like yours in a ski rsort like this. So quit your job and rent that U-haul trailer now so next winter this can be you. Not you just sitting there watching this and wishing that this was you.

  Warren Miller

  Jobs, Smart, Fall

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• To Forget Venice is a tour de force of ventriloquism. Elegant, contemporary, and wry, the voice at its center is also capable of disarming flights of imagination as it enters and inhabits other lives across time and gender. The glittering, fetid city emerges as a complex metaphor for the human heart’s simultaneous tenderness and capacity for cruelty, its ‘silver glow / a local specialty: filth / disguised as ornament.’ This Venice is unforgettable.

  Chase Twichell

  Heart, Venice, Voice

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• I am one of the searchers. There are millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery & unspeakable beauty. We like forests & mountains, deserts & hidden rivers, & lonely cities. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know.

  James Kavanaugh

  Lonely, Laughter, Ocean

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• It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.

  Michael Herr

  Vegas, Feelings, Trying

  Guy Peellaert, Michael Herr (1986). “The big room”

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• The role of the animal messenger in the dreams of modern city-dwellers is often to recall us to our wild side, and the natural path of our energy.

  Robert Moss

  Dream, Animal, Wild Side

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• New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.

  Delia Ephron

  Country, New York, Who I Am

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• More and more too, the old name absorbs into me. Mannahatta, 'the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.' How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!

  Walt Whitman

  Beautiful, New York, Sunshine

  Walt Whitman, Floyd Stovall (2007). “Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose”, p.683, NYU Press

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• If I could live in one city and do every single thing I do there, I would choose Venice. You can't turn your head without seeing something amazing.

  Nile Rodgers

  Venice, Turns, If I Could

  "On my radar: Nile Rodgers". Interview with Ellie Bothwell, www.theguardian.com. July 6, 2013.

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• Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Character, Stories

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• New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.

  Robert Benchley

  New York, People, Dresses

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• Libraries are the pride of the city.

  Amy Tan

  Pride, Library

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• And blind oblivion swallowed cities up.

  William Shakespeare

  Upbraid, Blind, Oblivion

  William Shakespeare (2015). “Troilus and Cressida: Third Series, Revised Edition”, p.183, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hate, Home, Feet

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, James L. W. West (2005). “Fitzgerald: My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940”, p.108, Cambridge University Press

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• Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?

  Lana Del Rey

  Mistake, Design, City Streets

  Song: Born to Die, Album: Born To Die, 2012

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• The citizens of a city are not guilty of the crimes committed in their city; but they are guilty as participants in the destiny of [humanity] as a whole and in the destiny of their city in particular; for their acts in which freedom was united with destiny have contributed to the destiny in which they participate. They are guilty, not of committing the crimes of which their group is accused, but of contributing to the destiny in which these crimes happened.

  Paul Tillich

  Destiny, Humanity, Groups

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