Cities Quotes

The people are immensely likable- cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.

You wrestle one night, get up the next morning and fly out to the next city.

You hardly find any military base in distant areas from the [Syria] cities unless it’s an airport or something like this, but most of the military bases or centers within inhabited areas.

Suppose we took a thousand negatives… combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.

Most people are walking around the city like corpses; they aren’t alive enough to notice the trash. They come from other places and they see it as a big garbage dump.

This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn’t changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

There is no doubt that many expensive national projects may add to our prestige or serve science. But none of them must take precedence over human needs. As long as Congress does not revise its priorities, our crisis is not just material, it is a crisis of the spirit.

And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded.

I was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen.