AMAZING CITIES

“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.”

“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.”

“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.”

---Walt Whitman (1819-1892) American poet.

“We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.”

---John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) Thirty-fifth President of the USA

“Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.”

---Plato (BC 427-BC 347) Greek philosopher.

“Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone”

---Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Poet, Lecturer and Essayist, 1803-1882)

“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”

---Hugh Newell Jacobsen

"I have an affection for a great city.  I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets."
---Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.” 

---Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist-this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul-a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.”
---Margaret Mead

“The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.”

---Desmond Morris

In the morning the city
Spreads its wings
Making a song
In stone that sings.

In the evening the city
Goes to bed
Hanging lights
About its head.
---Langston Hughes

“Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well builded, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity.”

---Alcaeus

“Crime does not follow poverty, it follows concentrations of poverty.”
---Reuben Greenberg, Police chief, Charleston SC

“People say that they do not want to live near where they work; but that they would like to work near where they live.”
---Zev Cohen

“How is a village a village? By including young & old, white & black, rich & poor, churches & shops.”
---Anonymous

“We must not build housing, we must build communities.”
---Mike Burton

“We have legislators who think it their duty only to listen to the people instead of becoming expert on the subjects which they must decide upon.”
---Andres Duany

“There are two types of environmentalists: those who understand that the city is part of the environment and those who do not.”
---Paul Soglin, Mayor of Madison WI

“Environmentalists should make good urbanists, since they understand systems, diversity, connectivity and interdependence.”
---Caryl Terrell

“In 1860, the capital city of Washington, with a population of 60,000, had unlighted streets, open sewers, and pigs roaming about its principal avenues.
This condition was worse than the worst of our current cities. There is hope.”
---Andres Duany

“Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey).”
---Bill Kraus

“Every city is a living body.”

---St. Augustine, City of God

“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”

---Toni Morrison, Jazz

“What is the city but the people?”

---William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
---John F. Kennedy

“The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic.  Only one exists and you are always in the same one.  It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, is their instantaneous magnetism.”

---Jean Baudrillard