Cities Quotes - Page 101

The first few feet of sea-level rise alone will displace more than 100 million people worldwide and turn all our major Gulf and Atlantic coast cities into pre- Katrina New Orleans - below sea level and facing super-hurricanes.

I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.

In rural areas the majority of the victims of violent crime know their assailants (indeed, are probably married to them); in cities, the killer and the mugger come out of the anonymous dark, their faces unrecognized, their motives obscure.

In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city's life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.

My audience is made up of two groups of people. The first group includes people whose roots are deep in the Christian faith, but for whom the traditional symbols, as traditionally understood, no longer make sense. The other audience is the audience that has left. I call them the Church Alumni Association, citizens of the secular city. They are a bit nostalgic about this faith of their childhood, but they aren't really interested in trotting it out or becoming involved with it again as it is presently organized.

Cities are for people. A city is where people come to work and raise their families and to spend their money and to walk in the evening. It is not a traffic corridor.

Highways dont belong in cities. Period. Europe didnt do it. America did. And our cities have paid the price.

To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.

I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It's where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that's where all the money goes.

Some people consider utopia to be derived from nature. For some people, utopia is the city.

I really want to live in New York. That's the city of my dreams.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

The two cities I've found very hard to leave in my life were New York and Buenos Aires.

My campaign is based upon the proposition that the answers to the problems which currently plague our cities, our towns, and our homes, are not to be found in the decisions in Washington. They are instead to be found in the hearts, minds and resources of our own people here at home.

You know I have been issued a public urination pass by the city because of my condition. Unfortunately, my little brother ran out of the house with it this morning. Him and his friends are probably peeing all over the city.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Antiwhite racism is developing in sections of our cities where individuals - some of whom have French nationality - contemptuously designate French people as gaulois on the pretext they don't share the same religion, color or origins.

We must start... rebuilding our cities around energy efficiency and human needs, rather than around the car and wasted energy.

The second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. ... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?