Quotes About Cities

When I started out, at the CBC in Toronto, there was so little work. It was a different world from what it is now. Now we're blessed with so much production in so many Canadian cities.

I call New York just a bigger version of Toronto.

The alarming thing in China is the almost total absence of primary care. Even in cities, there are no independent doctors' offices or neighborhood clinics, so people have to go to the hospital for every health care need.

The rate of innovation is a function of the total number of people connected and exchanging ideas. It has gone up as population has gone up. It's gone up as people have concentrated in cities.

ANTON LOVED PRAGUE. In fact, he simply couldn't understand how it was possible not to. There were some cities that confused you and suffocated you from the first, and there were some whose charm slowly and imperceptibly fascinated you.

The light of starry dreams can only be seen once we escape the blinding cities of disbelief.

Im saving up to buy art. Nothing famous, but every time Im in a new city I wander into galleries and dream about buying great pieces one day.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Once I told Ha?anala about the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . I told her how Abraham bargained with God for the lives of ten righteous men who might have lived there. She said to me, ?Abraham should have taken the babies from the cities. The babies were innocent.?

Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain

If you divide the world into those countries where the majority live in cities, and those where the majority live in the countryside, you find that the former are four times as wealthy, in terms of average income, as the latter.

Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.

The world's cities already contain half the world's people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world's land area.

the financial markets had helped accelerate the offshoring of jobs and the concentration of wealth in a handful of cities and economic sectors

The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren't well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.

Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disease. Until then, it looked like a losing battle all the way.

cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties," she wrote. They get their order from below; they are learning machines, pattern recognizers—even when the patterns they respond to are unhealthy ones.

The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice's lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans' lead—at least so far—and just move to other nearby cities. Either way the poplation stays urban.

Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That

Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won't be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there's an entire button-store district.

Formal city parks have a longevity to them that can exceed that of castles or cemeteries or forts.

whether cities or bodies—find productive uses for the waste they create.

high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.

Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and spread through the population at large.