2,405 Quotes About Cities

If I had to live in a city I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other--both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil's existence is freely recognized.

People don't live in New Orleans because it is easy. They live here because they are incapable of living anywhere else in the just same way.

The city gives even to children a sophisticated look that baffles the casual psychologist.

Today, humans in cities will see a hundred beings in just minutes, naming them strangers, a dehumanizing designation.

Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams.

The cities were sucking all the life of the country into themselves and destroying it. Men were no longer individuals, but units in a vast machine, all cut to one pattern, with the same tastes and ideas, the same mass-produced education that did not educate but only pasted a veneer of catchwords over ignorance.

Winter is our time. They shut up their cities for the cold months. They put their horses in stables and sit around great fires in enormous houses of stone. If you want a bearskin, do you attack in summer when it is strong and fast, or cut its throat as it sleeps?

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Oh you dear companions Electric bells of the stations song of the reapers Butcher's sleigh regiment of unnumbered streets Cavalry of bridges nights livid with alcohol The cities I've seen lived like mad women(The Voyager)