#Cities Quotes

“Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.”

“Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What possesses interest for us is thenatural of each, his constitutional excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.”

“London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day.”

“We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.”

“Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.”

“The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.”

“I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”

“What care though rival cities soarAlong the stormy coast,Penn's town, New York, Baltimore,If Boston knew the most!”

“It's one of the most progressive cities in the world. Shooting is only a sideline.”

“The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.”

“London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.”

“Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.”

“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”

“New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.”

“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.”

“New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.”

“I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”

“The general desire of men to live by their heads rather than their hands, and the strong allurements of great cities to those who have any turn for dissipation, threaten to make them here, as in Europe, the sinks of voluntary misery.”

“Cities of mortals woe-begone Fantastic care derides, But in the serious landscape lone Stern benefit abides.”

“New York is a sucked orange.”

“I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more - I could have gone earlier - it was suggested.”

“A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once-not oftener.”

“I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.”

“Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.”

“If the Earth were a single state, Istanbul would be its capital.”

“Half-a-dozen or twenty cities of India alone working together cannot bring Swaraj.”

“It's just good that Detroit is coming back. I'm so happy it's coming back because it needs to come back. When I do my trips around the world, and I can be anywhere, but I always see somebody from Detroit or Chicago. Those guys are world travelers.”

“I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.”

“It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”

“I must refuse to believe that the Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man's inhuman ingenuity.”

“Most cities are nouns. New York's a verb.”

“New York is what Paris was in the twenties. . . the center of the art world. And we want to be in the center. It's the greatest place on earth. . . I've got a lot of friends here and I even brought my own cash.”

“I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.”

“An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.”

“We're crazy about this city. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.”

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

“During many a single week, I daresay, more money is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year.”

“Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.”

“New York: A third-rate Babylon.”

“Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.”

“I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.”

“The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.”

“Manchester is the belly and guts of the nation”

“If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere; it's up to you, New York, New York.”

“I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps”

“Start spreading the news, I am leaving today.I want to be a part of it, New York, New York.”

“What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!”

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.”

“You have an impeccable argument if you said that Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo are food capitals. They have a maximum amount of great stuff to eat in the smallest areas.”

“You have to love a town where you can both smoke and gamble in a pharmacy.”