2,405 Quotes About Cities

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed— provided you have the money.

The intrusion of the concrete continues, proceeding to divide what neighborhood cohesiveness remains into yet smaller increments. The inner loop greatly helps those people commuting from the suburbs, wanting to drive swiftly past the dwelling structures and the people who cannot have the choice of moving to the suburbs. It is in the city where life begins. Our suburbs can only be as good as the heart of the city. When the city’s heart fails, then…

I found Baghdad, like most big cities in the world: big, exciting, interesting, rich, poor, hot, cold, restless, sleepless, and cruel at one and the same time.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.

With its population made up of two categories of people, those who do business and those upon whom they prey, the city has only a painful life to offer the young person who goes there to learn and to study; for sooner or later anyone who lives there, whatever his constitution, becomes disturbed and is eventually deranged and destroyed by the city, often in the most deadly and insidious manner.

Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.

Sometimes a city occupies an entire mountain; the clouds, trees and sun of the mountain disappear, but the inhabitants of that city continue their lives without knowing what they killed!