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Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

"Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 3, The Golden Horde, p. 58), 1989.
Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.