Cities Quotes - Page 154

Simply as a writer of books I'm thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.

By the end of the 1980s, Seattle had taken on the dangerous lustre of a promised city. The rumour had gone out that if you had failed in Detroit you might yet succeed in Seattle - and that if you'd succeeded in Seoul, you could succeed even better in Seattle... Seattle was the coming place. So I joined the line of hopefuls.

When New Yorkers tell one about the dangers of their city, the muggings, the dinner parties to which no one turns up for fear of being attacked on the way, the traffic snarl-ups, the bland indifference of the city cops, they are unmistakably bragging.

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

Seattle is a liberal city, its politics not so much blue in the American, not the British, sense as deep ultramarine, and its manners are studiously polite.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

As a matter of record, New York City spends a higher portion of its budget on instruction and associated costs within the schools themselves than any of the other 100 largest districts in the nation.

East St. Louis-which the local press refers to as "an inner city without an outer city"-has some of the sickest children in America. Of 66 cities in Illinois, East St. Louis ranks first in fetal death, first in premature birth, and third in infant health.

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

This movie came as a reaction to reality. I realized that I do not know that 80 of the population that lives poor in my city. I wanted to make a social experiment putting in the same car several people from different social classes, just to see what would happen.

Certain kinds of things that the novel used to do, which was, "Oh, I'm living out here in West Nowhere, Nebraska and I'm curious how the upper class in New York City lives, I guess I'll read a novel about it." We don't have to do that now. You just turn on the TV. Turn on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. You can get that information anywhere. Novels don't have to do that anymore.

Nothing highlights better the continuing gap between rhetoric and substance in British financial services than the failure of providers here to emulate Jack Bogle's index fund success in the United States. Every professional in the City knows that index funds should be core building blocks in any long-term investor's portfolio. Since 1976, the Vanguard index funds has produced a compound annual return of 12 percent, better than three-quarters of its peer group.

Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.

Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.

I have the liberal dictionary right here...let's see how they define water-boarding: 'Something done by the evil troops, who we don't support, to innocent terrorists violating their rights to bomb our cities and make us get gay marriage.'

With everything it has to offer, Las Vegas is an obvious destination for tourists, as proven by the over 40 million visitors the city welcomes per year.

Don't get me wrong, I think "Portlandia" is really funny, and quite brilliant, but I like to be in a city where I can hang out in Powell's Bookstore most nights and go out with my friends in a liberal, relaxed atmosphere. I wish more cities were like that.

Some cities are really boring and straight.

That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y'know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about

A lot of kids are moving to Baltimore, because we have a great music scene and we've got edge. Come on down, we've got scary edge. But great edge - it's still a city you can be a bohemian in.

I must admit, even my fans everywhere I go in the world - just this week I was in London and Glasgow and the week before I was in Des Moines - my fans all look the same in all those cities - they look great!

I probably would have made [films] anywhere. Every city has something they're ashamed of. I would have made films about it and turned it into something positive.

Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

It is not possible . . . to concentrate enough military planes with military loads over a modern city to destroy that city.

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.