City Quotes

Basketball teams, after the perfunctory lay-up drill, fall into the crowded isolation and personal style of 10 city kids shooting at the same basket or playing one-on-one.

Ted Solotaroff

Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams, Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!

Charles Baudelaire

Harmony with nature will bring you a happiness known to few city dwellers. In the company of other truth seekers it will be easier for you to meditate and think of God.

Paramahansa Yogananda

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Gore Vidal

The city of truth cannot be built on the swampy ground of skepticism.

Albert Schweitzer

The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.

Kingsley Amis

Each hamlet or village or town should be a place, its own place. This is not a matter of fake historicism or artsy-craftsy architecture. It is a matter of respect for things existing, subtle patterns of place woven from vistas and street widths and the siting and color and scale of stores, houses, and trees.... If the countryside is to prosper, it must be different from city or suburb.... The difference is in part the simple business of containing our towns and giving them boundaries.

Robert Riley

Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.

NEIL POSTMAN

Las Vegas marks itself out by nothingness. All the negative descriptions that can generally be used in labelling a city apply to it, for its absence of consistency actually makes its existence doubtful: no man's land, waste ground, non-place, ghost town, urban simulacrum, nowhere city, etc. For us it is Zeropolis, the non-city which is the very first city, just as zero is the very first number. The nothing that counts, the nothingness of neon

BRUCE BEGOUT

In Las Vegas, everything takes place as if the absence of any sense of belonging to the environment entailed a hypertrophied sensitivity to details. There is no possibility of visual escape into perceptual horizons of indeterminateness (left-right, forward-back, near-far), but, instead, only the pregnancy of enlarged, exaggerated and highlighted forms. Behind each lit-up sign no space is hollowed out, no incipient world. Everything is there, everything is flat. As thick as the giant advertising billboards that ubiquitously package it, loading it with nave and comic symbols, crude, schematic messages, Las Vegas is a city of literal superficiality.

BRUCE BEGOUT

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high.

Norman Mailer

Be a pattern to others, and then all will go well; for as a whole city is affected by the licentious passions and vices of great men, so it is likewise reformed by their moderation.

Thomas Carlyle

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Edward Hoagland

A city has values as well as slums, excitement as well as conflict a personality that has not yet been obliterated by its highways and gas

Charles Abrams

Park and open-space efforts can be described as an institutional reflection of the principal means by which urban man has historically engaged in the Edenic search. He has, since the beginnings of civilization, sought gardeners in his cities, a pastoral landscape outside of his cities, and wilderness for retreat away from his cities. Baghdad boasts a thousand gardens; Alexander set aside one quarter of his North African city as a park;...wilderness served as retreat for Jesus of Nazareth, as it did later for the Waldenisians and the Franciscans; and mediation in the wilderness is a common theme in Far Eastern cultures. Thus, there is good evidence that a prosperity for greenery as a substitute Eden in urban civilizations is not a particularity of any single race, religion, or national culture.

Charles E. Little†
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