Great Cities Quotes - Page 2

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Science, Men, Cities

Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.70, Penguin

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From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Winston Churchill

America, Hair, Order

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In great cities men are more callous both to the happiness and the misery of others, than in the country; for they are constantly in the habit of seeing both extremes.

Charles Caleb Colton

Country, Sadness, Men

Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.356

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In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors.

Benjamin Disraeli

Men, Cities, Desire

Benjamin Disraeli, Sheila Mary Smith (1981). “Sybil: or, the two nations”, Oxford University Press, USA

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I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.

Thomas Jefferson

Art, Health, Men

Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: 1799-1803”, p.147, Cosimo, Inc.

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The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

Thomas Jefferson

Heart, Government, Law

Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey (2008). “The Essential Jefferson”, p.75, Courier Corporation

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I love Philadelphia. I was shocked at what a great city this is. For me, it is the cat's pajamas. I love everything about it. I love where I live. I love the people. I have been met with such kindness and affection here.

George Dzundza

Kindness, Cat, Cities

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I think it's a great city. I think it's a fabulous city. But in my young juvenile days, I was an idiot, and I bought 30 cars. And I need to drive those cars, and New York isn't really the place you can do that.

Shaquille O'Neal

New York, Thinking, Cities

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I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.

Thomas Jefferson

Men, Views, Cities

Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.28, Cambridge University Press

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As you probably know, some American politicians and American journalists refer to Washington, DC as the "capital of the free world." But it seems to me that Brussels, which boasts 1,000 years of history and which serves as the capital of Belgium, the home of the European Union, and the headquarters for NATO, this city has its own legitimate claim to that title.

Joe Biden

Home, Years, Cities

"Biden Says Brussels Could Be 'Capital of the Free World'", www.foxnews.com. May 25, 2010.

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Time is a dream ... a destroying dream;
It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;
It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.

Conrad Aiken

Dream, Time, Wall

Conrad Aiken (1920). “The House of Dust: A Symphony”

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Life, my dear Watson, is infinitely stranger than fiction; stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not conceive the things that are merely commonplace to existence. If we could hover over this great city, remove the roofs, and peep in at the things going on, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions flat, stale and unprofitable.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Men, Cities, Mind

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It was the hard work of our people, the freedom they enjoyed and their faith in God that built this country and made it the envy of the world. In all of our great cities and towns evidence of the faith of our people is found: houses of worship of every denomination are among the oldest structures. While never willing to bow to a tyrant, our forefathers were always willing to get to their knees before God. When catastrophe threatened, they turned to God for deliverance. When the harvest was bountiful the first thought was thanksgiving to God.

Ronald Reagan

God, Country, Hard Work

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Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.

Henry George

Book, Men, Fire

Henry George (2006). “Progress and Poverty”, p.381, Cosimo, Inc.

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Chicago is a beautiful city. It's one of those places that people around the world see and say, 'Maybe one day.' There's so much excitement in the city about what you can accomplish and what you can be. We get this stigma, and rightfully so, because of the killings, but it's one of the best cities in the world. I'm biased, but I think it's a great city. Not only to be from, but to go to.

Dwyane Wade

Beautiful, Thinking, Cities

Source: www.ebony.com

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I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he's an American child.

Richard M. Nixon

Children, Italian, What Matters

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What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?

P. G. Wodehouse

Yield, Cities, Temptation

P. G. Wodehouse (2015). “My Man Jeeves”, p.29, Booklassic

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There is something more annoying than pleasant in finding neighbors from back home chiselling in on your own exclusive New York. It mitigates your triumph in having conquered the great city and brings home the ungratifying truth that anyone can do it.

Dawn Powell

New York, Home, Cities

Dawn Powell (2001). “Novels, 1930-1942”

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What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

Charles Baudelaire

Eye, Cities, Monsters

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As a citizen of the great city of Chicago, I find it impossible to root against the White Sox. The White Sox organization has been much more consistent, in my lifetime at least, at putting a winning ballclub on the field.

Billy Corgan

Winning, Cities, Organization

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They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

Salman Rushdie

Destiny, Cities, Crowds

Salman Rushdie (2000). “The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel”, p.52, Macmillan

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Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Rome, Hands, Cities

Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.80, A&C Black

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To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

Michel de Certeau

Moving, Practice, Cities

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To be engaged in some small way in the revival of one of the great cities of the world is to live a meaningful existence by default.

Chris Rose

Meaningful, New Orleans, Cities

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A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Charles Dickens

Heart, Night, Cities

A Tale of Two Cities bk. 1, ch. 3 (1859)

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