Browsing Topic Best Cities Quotes

One time, I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I was with a friend who said to me, You just littered on the street! Don’t you care about the environment? And I thought about it, and I said, You know what? This isn’t the environment. This is New York City. New York City is not the environment. New York City is a giant piece of litter. Next to Mexico City, it’s the shittiest piece of litter in the world. Just a pussy, runny, smokin’, stinkin’ piece of litter.

I sell mirrors in the city of the blind.

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.

It’s a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they’ve demolished so many landmarks. It’s a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It’s a strange town, it’s this sprawling suburb, and then there’s a city, the old town.

Noise is manufactured in the city, just as goods are manufactured. The city is the place where noise is kept in stock, completely detached from the object from which it came.

Hell is a real place, more real than the city in which you live, much hotter and more populated.

To dislocate the functioning of a city without destroying it can be more effective than a riot because it can be longer-lasting, costly to the society but not wantonly destructive, moreover, it is more difficult for Government to quell it by superior force.

I’m an immigrant kid who came to America from India when I was very young and grew up in New York City with a single mom and really was influenced by all of those immigrant cultures bumping up against each other.

I know that statistically, it has been proven that there is a tremendous amount of black on black crime within the inner cities.

I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically – and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I’ve dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.

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.

A just city should favor justice and the just, hate tyranny and injustice, and give them both their just deserts.

My soul is lost, my friend, tell me how do I begin again? My city’s in ruins, my city’s in ruins.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.

If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution.

I think most people do not imagine how things can change. In Detroit, there are community gardens that are only an indication that the country is coming back to the city. And that is something that actually is necessary to stop the real imminent danger of the extermination of our planet.

Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.

In vain we build the city if we do not first build the man.

She gave him such a look… Man oh man, if looks could kill. That one might have totalled a city block.

We urgently need a paradigm shift in our concept of the purposes and practices of education. We need to leave behind the concept of education as a passport to more money and higher status in the future and replace it with a concept of education as an ongoing process that enlists the tremendous energies and creativity of schoolchildren in rebuilding and respiriting our communities and our cities now, in the present.

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God.

The people must fight on behalf of the law as though for the city wall.

One of the things that’s very important, when you’re an activist and an organizer like me, is to understand that when things happen of that nature, some people become immobilized and other people begin to find solutions. And Detroit is the kind of city where we begin to find solutions.

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

It’s totally different now, traveling to different meets and different cities and actually being able to enjoy the cities I’m in.

I think of what’s happening in Detroit as part of something that’s much bigger. Most people think of the decline of the city as having to do with African-Americans and being in debt, and all the issues like crime and bad housing. But what happened is that when globalization took place, following World War II, Detroit’s role as the center and the symbol of industrialization was destroyed. It wasn’t because we had black citizens mainly or a black mayor; it was because the world was changing.

The Venus Project is not about new cities or new architecture. It’s about a way of thinking

There’s no such thing as designing the perfect utopian city. Everything is subject to change. There are no final frontiers.

A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.

If there’s a group like Amish people, that want to live their own lifestyle – they don’t want to live in our city – they want to live out in the country, with their own projects. We’ll put up the buildings for them, design the buildings for them, design the food production systems for them – if they want us to. But we don’t control them.

I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren’t that motivated.