Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Cities.
Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.
Neil Gaiman
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
Jane Austen
We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.Description of Provincetown, Massachusetts
Norman Mailer
There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.
Don Herold
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
Margaret Mead
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.
Murray Kempton
I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great G
No other city in the U.S. can divest the visitor of so much money with so little enthusiasm. In Dallas, they take away with gusto; in New Orleans, with a bow; in San Francisco, with a wink and a grin. In New York, you're lucky if you get a grunt.
Fletcher Knebel, "Look", March 2
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
Frank Lloyd Wright
This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
William Wordsworth
The crowds in the big towns, with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes.
George Orwell
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The city is recruited from the country.
Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
Ambrose Bierce
Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.
Samuel Johnson
There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.
Chief Seattle
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea
John Updike, On London, in, "New
