Quotes About Cities

It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits

Most long-distance travel and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were seaports—Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean.

The government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.

Beginning about ten thousand years ago, cities began to emerge. Although tiny by today's standards, they were the centers of the first "civilizations," a word derived from civitas, which means "citizenship" or "inhabitants of a city" in Latin. Because farming created assets to plunder and to protect, it also created a requirement for inventory accounting.

I see good men performing wonderful deeds, smoking marijuana and feeding LSD to cops, telling fairytales about the future. Spectacular things, no doubt. But where? In the White House? On Wall Street? No. These wonderful things happen in tenement buildings, in the slums, in dying cities. Forgive me if I don't expect these, uh, these—great things—to change the course of history.

So many places it could be,' Ramaas replied. He was moving closer. 'Paris. London. Rome. Berlin. All the rest. I wish God had given me enough weapons to strike them all. But I will be satisfied with what I have. A city full of thieves will be burned to ashes and all who gave them succor will suffer for it.

It seems that a civilization-wide catastrophe involving the "death" of all these cities occurred at approximately the same time, around 1500—the time of the Spanish conquest. Yet the Spanish never conquered the region; they never explored or even penetrated these remote jungles.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

More than 90 percent of Americans lived in the countryside, either on farms or plantations. Only three cities, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, had populations of more than 16,000, making them flyspecks compared with London (750,000) or Peking (almost 3 million).6

Nightside, cities glistened in chains, and a spray of tinkertoy habitats girdled the planet. Gossamer starbridges reached from the equator towards orbit.

In Belgium, we know the U.S. culture through the television, but it's not the truth. It's interesting to see that Philadelphia is really industrial. I love industrial cities. Everybody hates them, but I think they're the best places to be creative. The more gritty it is, the more I love it.

There's a difference between performing in Philadelphia to New York as much as a difference between playing in Luton and playing in San Francisco, y'know what I mean?

There are many beautiful and resource-rich areas all over the Philippines that are still undeveloped or under-developed. These areas offer opportunities for better master-planning and the emergence of better communities as well as cities.

Well, it's like this - I hate Los Angeles and I love Phoenix.

Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.

American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection. We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

It's just a joy travelling with your job. You get to wander around these interesting cities and then things happen or you observe things and you go on stage at the end of the night and chat about it.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

All sensible Army people turned gas warfare down as being utterly insane since, in view of your superiority in the air, it would not be long before it would bring the most terrible catastrophe upon German cities, which were completely unprotected.

Cities tend to be representations of societies: diversity and inequality find their extremes in urban settings. Yet, when war is added onto pre-existing inequalities, high levels of poverty, or even disaster, urban fragility increases exponentially, making it harder to absorb the shocks of warfare.

Pollution from human activities is changing the Earth's climate. We see the damage that a disrupted climate can do: on our coasts, our farms, forests, mountains, and cities. Those impacts will grow more severe unless we start reducing global warming pollution now.

All cities do face similar, significant trends in the future... most importantly global warming and climate change.

Even if we accepted the health implications of pollution and the impact on global warming, from a simple space management perspective, mobility will eventually collapse in cities that give priority to the car.