Urban Quotes - Page 19

• I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

  Bill Mollison

  People, Spoiled, Permaculture

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• I think there's no question that Michael Jackson was the foremost entertainer of his generation; perhaps of all time, arguably, taking the skills of a Sammy Davis, Jr., bringing together the street dance of African American urban culture, joining them to the politics of dance, of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly on that sphere alone.

  Michael Eric Dyson

  Thinking, Skills, African American

  Interview with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. June 30, 2009.

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• Walkman was the precursor to the cell phone, in terms of your strategy for getting through the urban landscape and the modern experience. Insulate yourself from it with your own soundscape.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Phones, Cells, Landscape

  "Douglas Rushkoff on Khaleesi Lady Gaga and why Sopranos' end works but Lost's doesn't". The A.V. Club Interview, www.avclub.com. March 22, 2013.

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• The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Choices, Design, Desire

  Rebecca Solnit (2001). “Wanderlust: A History of Walking”, p.194, Penguin

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• It's quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century...He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the lord of misrule and the world as a theatre of the absurd.

  Grant Morrison

  Perception, Theatre, May

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• So, is there hope for a truly democratic Africa? Long answer: Only if continent-wide improvements in education, human rights and public health are coupled with an aggressive and far-sighted debt-relief program that breaks the cycle of subsistence farming and urban squalor. Short answer: No.

  Jon Stewart

  Rights, Long, Relief

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• Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.

  Kiran Desai

  Names, Black, Employment

  Kiran Desai (2007). “The Inheritance of Loss”, p.112, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We are contemporary citizens living in a technological world. Swimming in crosscultural waters can be dangerous, and if you are honest you can't stay there very long. Sooner or later you have to look at your own reflection and decide what to do with yourself. We are urban people. We make periodic pilgrimages to the country. . . . If we align ourselves with the spirit of place we will find humility fused with joy. The land holds stories.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Country, Humility, Swimming

  Terry Tempest Williams (1984). “Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland”, p.136, UNM Press

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• We've concocted a system where local trips take an auto. That's our biggest tragedy. Streetcars, such as those used in Portland's Pearl District, and elevated people movers, like those in downtown Miami, are moving people from rail stations to their final destinations. But a new concept, PRT, may help revolutionize urban transportation, providing a cost-effective way to get people from train stations to where they need to go.

  Peter Calthorpe

  Moving, People, Tragedy

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• The decision to rely heavily on high-altitude air power, target urban infrastructure and repeatedly attack heavily populated towns and villages has reflected a deliberate trade-off of the lives of American pilots and soldiers, not with those of their declared Taliban enemies, but with Afghan civilians... There will be no official two-minute silence for the Afghan dead, no newspaper obituaries or memorial services attended by the prime minister, as there were for the victims of the twin towers.

  Seumas Milne

  Air, Two, Silence

  " The innocent dead in a coward's war" by Seumas Milne, www.theguardian.com. December 19, 2001.

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• Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda’s voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it’s indelibly her own.

  Dennis Lehane

  Pain, Ivy, Voice

  "Visitation Street". Book by Ivy Pochoda, 2013.

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• Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

  Peter Thiel

  Photography, Optimistic, Player

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.76, Crown Business

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• Any page by Paul Goodman will give you not only originality and brilliance but wisdom, that is, something to think about. He is our peculiar, urban, twentieth-century Thoreau, the quintessential American mind of our time.

  Hayden Carruth

  Thinking, Giving, Mind

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• I have my own production company called Urban Dreams.

  Chaske Spencer

  Dream, Company, My Own

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• What I find more remarkable, however, is how readily many people in our society believe outlandish and unsubstantiated urban myths and conspiracies (Pop Rocks and Coke, JFK assassination, AIDS is man-made, etc.), yet disregard thousands of personal and consistent testimonies of miracles and near-death experiences from people throughout all cultures and religions.

  Mary C. Neal

  God, Christian, Religious

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• I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence... I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich.

  Charles Rangel

  War, Cutting, Thinking

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• We need to review our policies as it applies to urban cities - You see, I'm losing either of them, but especially cities like Baltimore, we need to review them and I think we should come with no pre conception.

  Julie Roginsky

  Thinking, Cities, Needs

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• I never realised that the Edinburgh skyline was so interesting - it's gothic and very urban and there's a lot of church spires and old brownstone buildings.

  Jamie Bell

  Interesting, Church, Edinburgh

  "Hallam Foe - Jamie Bell interview" by Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.

  Arthur Koestler

  Men, Order, Evil

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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• If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

  Salman Rushdie

  India, Phrases, Speech

  "Salman Rushdie". Salon Interview, www.salon.com. January 28, 1996.

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• Urban design is where the number are and easy size of installation plus the fast lessons to extend out to larger design acreage.

  Geoff Lawton

  Numbers, Design, Lessons

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• One has to watch out for engineers. They begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.

  Marcel Pagnol

  Machines, Bombs, Watches

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• Many of the customers here are traveling all over the world so they need multiple types of clothes. That's one thing about Urban Zen - it is seasonless and it is timeless. So it's not about the fashion of a moment saying, "I have to have it now." It's something that you become a part of...sort of like a sari.

  Donna Karan

  Fashion, Clothes, Sari

  "Donna Karan on Meditation, Fashion - and Love". Interview with Mayu Saini, wwd.com. March 28, 2016.

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• One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.

  Frank Gehry

  Hero, Men, Design

  Interview with David Sheff, www.playboy.com. March 1, 2011.

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• When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.

  Frank Gehry

  School, Cities, Ideas

  Interview with David Sheff, www.playboy.com. March 1, 2011.

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