Cities

Cities are relatively large and long lasting human settlements. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.

Quotes

 * No town has greater right on you than the other. The best town for you is that which bears you.
 * Ali, Nahj al-Balagha, letters and sayings, Hadith n. 442
 * When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.
 * Aristotle, Politics, book 1, chapter 2; reported in Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics (translation by Benjamin Jowett and Thomas Twining, 1952), p. 5.


 * Not so long ago, I examined some maps showing juvenile delinquency, diptheria, tuberculosis and murder quotients in a number of cities from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The maps all looked alike. Disease, crime and delinquency were invariably grouped in the same parts of the cities — in the slum districts. That is the cause of crime, not the motion picture.
 * Humphrey Bogart, “Censorship: Jimmy Walker Never Heard of a Book Seducing a Dame but Bluenoses are Still on the Trail of our Films”, Hollywood Reporter, (Oct 1941); republished in “When Humphrey Bogart Tackled Movie Censorship in 1941”, Hollywood Reporter, (2/27/2018).


 * Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime,— A rose-red city—half as old as time!
 * John William Burgon, Petra. A Prize Poem Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June 4, 1845, lines 131–132. Oxford: Francis Macpherson (1845), p. 14.


 * I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture.
 * Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816), Stanza 72.


 * A city has to be a place where you can get everything – and do anything, or nothing.
 * Herbert Eugene Caen, A city is like San Francisco, not a faceless 'burb. The San Francisco Chronicle, published Sunday, October 31, 2010, sfgate.com.


 * Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”
 * Boston to Divest From Fossil Fuels, Tobacco, Private Prisons, Chief Investment Officer, Dec 6, 2021


 * If you are a Christian, no earthly city is yours. Of our City ‘the Builder and Maker is God.’ Though we may gain possession of the whole world, we are withal but strangers and sojourners in it all. We are enrolled in heaven: our citizenship is there! Let us not, after the manner of little children, despise things that are great, and admire those which are little! Not our city’s greatness, but virtue of soul is our ornament and defence. If you suppose dignity to belong to a city, think how many persons must partake in this dignity, who are whoremongers, effeminate, depraved and full of ten thousand evil things, and at last despise such honour! But that City above is not of this kind; for it is impossible that he can be a partaker of it, who has not exhibited every virtue.
 * John Chrysostom Homilies on the Statues, Homily XVII


 * God made the country, and man made the town.
 * William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book I, line 749.


 * The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People who come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here—really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things once were done—which is the key to why they are done as they are today.
 * Samuel R. Delany, Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 5


 * To anyone growing up in any large city, the immediate neighborhood becomes the world. The street on which one lives provides a kid with local identification somewhat similar to being branded by national origin. Streets have a status. They grow, get old and change in character. In large coastal cities, immigration has an effect on the profile of a street altering it as each new group enters, stays a while, assimilates and then moves away. Streets seem to have a discernible life. Some start out ostentatiously and gradually descend into slums while others begin as poor the disreputable neighborhoods and rise to ostentation through what city planners call gentrification.
 * Will Eisner, A Contract With God, XIX, December 2004


 * When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?
 * Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
 * What will you answer? “We all dwell together
 * To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
 * T. S. Eliot, The Rock


 * My troops are bound to me as a cow is bound to its calf; but like a son who, hating his mother, leaves his city, my princely sister holy has run away from me back to brick-built Kulaba. If she loves her city and hates me, why does she bind the city to me? If she hates the city and yet loves me, why does she bind me to the city?
 * Enmerkar, in Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird, Ur III Period (21st century BCE).


 * Latin America is particularly susceptible to pockets of crime because of its speedy urbanization. Its cities grew faster than in most other parts of the world during the past 50 years, according to the Economist. By 2000, three-quarters of the population lived in towns and cities. That is about double the proportion in Asia and Africa. As the Economist explains, “that move from the countryside concentrated risk factors for lethal violence — inequality, unemployed young men, dislocated families, poor government services, easily available firearms — even as it also brought together the factors needed for economic growth.”
 * Amanda Erickson, “Latin America is the world’s most violent region. A new report investigates why.”, The Washington Post, (April 25, 2018).


 * Round about [there will be] eighteen thousand [cubits]; and the name of the city from [that] day on will be Jehovah Himself Is There.
 * Ezequiel 48:35


 * Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
 * Hesiod Works and Days (c. 700 BC) variant translation: Oft hath even a whole city reaped the evil fruit of a bad man.
 * line 240.


 * Good as the city -- there is nothing as good as this!
 * Inanna, A hymn (shir-namshub) to Inana (Inana G), at.


 * City air makes you free after a year and a day
 * at.


 * The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
 * Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), VI.


 * The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual’s dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.
 * Lyndon B. Johnson, special message to the Congress on the nation's cities (March 2, 1965); reported in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, book 1, p. 240.


 * What's Rome to me, what business have I there?
 * I who can neither lie, nor falsely swear?
 * Nor praise my patron's undeserving rhymes,
 * Nor yet comply with him, nor with his times?
 * Juvenal, Satire III, lines 75-78, John Dryden, trans.


 * It shall be remembered that the first to be mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures as a builder of cities was at the same time the first murderer — Cain. (Gen. 4:17.)
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 71n


 * Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke.
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd (1943), p. 85


 * Go through that city, and behold What intellect can yield, How it brings forth an hundred-fold From time’s enduring field. Those walls are filled with wealth, the spoil Of industry and thought, The mighty harvest which man’s toil Out of the past has wrought.
 * Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap book, 1835 (1834), 'Manchester'
 * How wonderful the common street, Its tumult and its throng, The hurrying of the thousand feet That bear life's cares along. How strongly is the present felt, With such a scene beside; All sounds in one vast murmur melt The thunder of the tide.
 * Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1836 (1835) 'Scenes in London: Piccadilly'


 * I do own I have a most affectionate attachment for London—the deep voice of her multitudes "haunts me like a passion." I delight in observing the infinite variety of her crowded streets, the rich merchandise of the shops, the vast buildings, whether raised for pomp, commerce, or charity, down to the barrel-organ, whose music is only common because it is beautiful. The country is no more left as it was originally created, than Belgrave Square remains its pristine swamp. The forest has been felled, the marsh drained, the enclosures planted, and the field ploughed. All these, begging Mr. Cowper’s pardon, are the works of man’s hands; and so is the town—the one is not more artificial than the other.
 * Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833 (1832) 'Linmouth'


 * Any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!
 * Fritz Leiber, Diary in the Snow (1947) in the collection Night’s Black Agents


 * I am a child of the city. I was born in one, but that alone is not enough to make a man want, even need, to live and die in one, not even the city of his birth is London, as mine is. Millions are born in cities and flee them, London included; others go on living in them and become more and more unhappy. I think I can understand what moves those who cannot endure city life, but that is largely because the things they cannot abide are the very things that made cities so attractive to me in the first place.
 * Bernard Levin, Enthusiasms (1983), ch. 4, p. 75.


 * To burn a city, there is needed only a child or a madman; but to rebuild it, architects, materials, workmen, money, and especially time, will be required.
 * Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809), XXXVIII


 * The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country.
 * Karl Marx, The German Ideology
 * The Marx-Engels Reader


 * The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
 * Desmond Morris (2009), The Human Zoo, p. vii


 * The size of a town rarely determines my pleasure. If a person does not enjoy a small town, it's likely he is too small-minded to delight in the ordinary.
 * Sam Pickering,


 * [ Solon] being asked, namely, what city was best to live in, “That city,” he replied, “in which those who are not wronged, no less than those who are wronged, exert themselves to punish the wrongdoers.”
 * Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin (1914), life of Solon, section 18, vol. 1, p. 455.


 * Petite ville, grand renom.
 * Small town, great renown.
 * François Rabelais, Pantagruel (1532), Book V, Chapter XXXV. Of Chinon, Rabelais's native town.


 * We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.
 * Theodore Roosevelt, "The City in Modern Life", Literary Essays (vol. 12 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed., 1926), p. 226. Book review in The Atlantic Monthly (April 1895).


 * This country is known by its cities: those amazing aggregations of people and housing, offices and factories, which constitute the heart of our civilization, the nerve center of our collective being.
 * Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton,


 * Les villes sont le gouffre de l'espèce humaine.
 * Cities are the abyss of the human species.
 * Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or, On Education (1762), Book I; gouffre is sometimes translated as "sink" instead of "abyss".


 * The people are the city.
 * William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (c. 1607-08), Act III, scene 1, line 200.


 * Without suburbs a city has no centre either.
 * Šuruppak, Instructions of Shuruppak (3rd millennium BCE).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (And Later)

 * Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 121-22.


 * Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenæ, Hæ septem certant de stirpe insignis Homeri.
 * Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athens—these seven cities contend as to being the birthplace of the illustrious Homer. (The second line sometimes runs "Orbis de patria certat, Homere, tua.")
 * Anonymous translation from Greek. Same in Antipater of Sidon.


 * The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
 * Euripides, Encomium on Alcibiades. (Probably quoted). See Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes.


 * In the busy haunts of men.
 * Felicia Hemans, Tale of the Secret Tribunal, Part I, line 2.


 * Seven cities warr'd for Homer being dead, Who living had no roofe to shroud his head.
 * Thomas Heywood, Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells.


 * Far from gay cities, and the ways of men.
 * Homer, The Odyssey, Book 14, line 410. Pope's translation.


 * Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.
 * Every man cannot go to Corinth.
 * Horace, Epistles, I. 17. 36.


 * Even cities have their graves!
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Amalfi, Stanza 6.


 * Friends and loves we have none, nor wealth, nor blest abode But the hope, the burning hope, and the road, the lonely road. Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind, For we go seeking cities that we shall never find.
 * John Masefield, The Seekers.


 * Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.
 * Matthew. V. 14.


 * Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.
 * John Milton, L'Allegro, line 117.


 * Nisi Dominus frustra.
 * Unless the Lord keep the city the watchman waketh in vain (lit., unless the Lord in vain).
 * Motto of City of Edinburgh, adapted from Psalms. CVII. 1. Vulgate.


 * Fields and trees are not willing to teach me anything; but this can be effected by men residing in the city.
 * Plato, Works, Volume III. The Phædrus.


 * I dwelt in a city enchanted, And lonely indeed was my lot;    *    *    *    *    * Though the latitude's rather uncertain,  And the longitude also is vague, The persons I pity who know not the City  The beautiful City of Prague.
 * W. J. Prowse, The City of Prague ("Little Village on Thames.").


 * Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion,… the city of the great King.
 * Psalms. XLVIII. 2.


 * Great Homer's birthplace seven rival cities claim, Too mighty such monopoly of Fame.
 * Thomas Seward, on Shakespeare's Monument at Stratford-upon-Avon.


 * Urbem lateritiam accepit, mamoream relinquit.
 * He [Cæsar Augustus] found a city built of brick; he left it built of marble.
 * Suetonius, (adapted), Cæsar Augustus, 28.


 * The city of dreadful night.
 * James Thomson, Current Literature for 1889, p. 492.


 * Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana ædificavit urbes.
 * Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.
 * Marcus Terentius Varro, De Re Rustica, III. 1.


 * This poor little one-horse town.
 * Mark Twain, The Undertaker's Story.


 * Fuimus Troes; fuit Ilium.
 * We have been Trojans; Troy was.
 * Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), II. 324.


 * Those who live in the present have a future.
 * Marc Engelhard, Collected Quotes.