Metropolis Quotes

• The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Men, Desire, World

  Rem Koolhaas (2014). “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan”, p.493, The Monacelli Press, LLC

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• All great art is born of the metropolis.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Cities, Born

  1913 Letter to Harriet Monroe, 7 Nov.

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• All cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind.

  Hans-Georg Gadamer

  Cities, Mind

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• By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

  Jane Jacobs

  Education, Strange, Given

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.238, Vintage

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• They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

  Salman Rushdie

  Destiny, Cities, Crowds

  Salman Rushdie (2000). “The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel”, p.52, Macmillan

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• The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy.

  Georg Simmel

  Economy, Seats

  Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff (1950). “The Sociology of Georg Simmel”, p.411, Simon and Schuster

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• I met a bunch of comic-book writers at the Metropolis convention and there was such an interesting discussion about the story of 'Supergirl' and trying to get it right. It can be a challenge, because you don't want it to be the same as the Superman story.

  Helen Slater

  Book, Interesting, Challenges

  "Helen Slater Talks About Smallville". movieweb.com. November 1, 2007.

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• The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  New York, Should Have, Cities

  "The Age of Uncertainty". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1977.

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• So are you moving on now? Is that what brought you to the grand metropolis of Valladolid?” “No. The wind just blew me here.” “What? Like a plastic bag?” “I prefer to think of myself as a ship. Like a sailboat.

  Gayle Forman

  Moving, Thinking, Wind

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• Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

  John Berger

  Village, Emigration, Chosen

  John Berger (2014). “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos”, p.45, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.

  Mark Twain

  Money, Writing, Cities

  Mark Twain, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “Great Speeches”, p.134, Courier Corporation

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• In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

  Quentin Crisp

  Expanding Universe, Sides, Outcast

  "The Naked Civil Servant". Book by Quentin Crisp, Chapter 3, 1968.

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• At a moderate calculation, among a million of persons inhabiting the metropolis, there are, at least, twenty-five thousand children who attend these schools, and cost their parents as many pounds sterling, per annum.

  Joseph Lancaster

  Children, School, Parent

  Joseph Lancaster (1805). “Improvements in Education, as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community: Containing Among Other Important Particulars, an Account of the Institution for the Education of One Thousand Poor Children, Borough Road Southwark; and of the New System of Education on which it is Conducted”, p.180

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• In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.

  Quentin Crisp

  Expanding Universe, Addresses, Sides

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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, Cities, Space

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

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• When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

  Robert Moses

  Meat, Way, Clean Slate

  "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro, (p. 849), 1974.

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• Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.

  Garrett Hardin

  Doe, Unbearable, Behavior

  Garrett James Hardin (1972). “Exploring new ethics for survival: the voyage of the spaceship Beagle”, Viking Adult

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• New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

  Roland Barthes

  New York, Real, Men

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

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• The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.

  Berenice Abbott

  Forever, Goes On, Realizing

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• Though woman needs the protection of one man against his whole sex, in pioneer life, in threading her way through a lonely forest, on the highway, or in the streets of the metropolis on a dark night, she sometimes needs, too, the protection of all men against this one.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Lonely, Sex, Dark

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida Husted Harper (1889). “History of woman suffrage”

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• There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.

  Fritz Lang

  Heart, Hands, Understanding

  Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou (1973). “Metropolis”, Lorrimer Publishing Ltd.

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• This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel. It is the time to preach it from the rooftops.

  Pope John Paul II

  Rooftops, Ashamed

  Pope John Paul II (2003). “Go in Peace: A Gift of Enduring Love”, p.47, Loyola Press

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• London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

  Anna Quindlen

  Doors, Soho, London

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• In this metropolis a number of lurking leeches infamously gain subsistence by practicing on the credulity of women.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Numbers, Atheism, Leeches

  Mary Wollstonecraft (2008). “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, p.191, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Houston is a cruel, crazy town on a filthy river in East Texas with no zoning laws and a culture of sex, money and violence. It's a shabby, sprawling metropolis ruled by brazen women, crooked cops and super-rich pansexual cowboys who live by the code of the West -- which can mean just about anything you need it to mean, in a pinch.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Sex, Crazy, Mean

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