2,405 Quotes About Cities

Nigeria was a blank on the map - there weren't even any maps. The US State Department, everyone said don't go there. It was courageous of Harvard University: the notion was that we would match Harvard students with Nigerian students, so that every student would have a guide, creating a guarantee of intimacy with the city.

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency.

We discovered a person in Lagos who had a fish stall, and within a single square metre she carried two children all the way to Harvard. She supported an unbelievable escape of her children into education. In that sense it was a city completed pixillated, and every pixel contained amazing stories.

The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system.

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

I learned more at The Second City than I did at Yale for all that high tuition.

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

San Francisco is a mad city - inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.

You, me, this city, this country, we will always have a choice.When you stand up to be counted, tell the world, THIS IS MY VOICE. There are many like it, but this one is mine.