Famous Quotes about Cities and City Life (91 Quotations)

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

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

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears — as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

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

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.