Urban Quotes - Page 8

• I think the book [Straight to the Heart: Political Cantos] has meaning for any large city with urban problems. There are political machines in a lot of large cities, and everywhere the goals of society get lost.

  Angela Alioto

  Book, Heart, Thinking

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• We have so few unaffiliated public intellectuals now - people who are not beholden to a think tank, corporate-owned media, or academic department - and even many literary writers look and behave like young urban professionals and canny careerists.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Thinking, Media, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As cities get more dense, you have people saying, "Why would you have an urban farm when you could have affordable housing on that property instead?" So there's an argument against it. Another huge thing is there's a brain drain toward growing marijuana. You know, if someone has a green thumb in an urban area, especially in places like Washington or Oregon where it's now totally legal, why wouldn't you just grow pot?

  Novella Carpenter

  Marijuana, People, Brain

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• This was early '90s and in New York hip-hop was coming on really strong; that was the sort of urban folk music that was almost threatening to eclipse rock music and indie rock music in terms of popularity, which it has certainly gone on to do. But you know, this is the end of the 1980s, beginning of the '90s. The whole independent label thing has really evolved to this incredible point from the early '80s when we started, and there wasn't one record label at all, until a couple people started forming these small labels.

  Lee Ranaldo

  Strong, Couple, Independent

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• "Acoustic ecologist" is basically a fancy name for someone who tries to become a better listener. Not just listening to those thoughts, ideas, and productions of human intention, but listening to places - whether it's an urban environment, residential, industrial, or even the farthest corner of the world, in one of our last great quiet places where we can listen to the pure sounds of nature without any human-caused noise intrusions.

  Gordon Hempton

  Listening, Trying, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Noise pollution is basically defined as the presence of simple information that makes it impossible to hear all the other more delicate - and often more important - information. Noise pollution creates, if you will, dumb environments. Our industrial areas, many of our downtown urban areas, are dumb acoustic environments. Very simple, very loud, often unhealthy.

  Gordon Hempton

  Simple, Dumb, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was interested in urban planning. I became an urban studies major, with a minor in poetry. I don't think I knew what I was looking for in my early twenties, but I know I kept not finding it.

  Ayana Mathis

  College, Thinking, Planning

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Few would look at a concrete highway system or an electrical grid and perceive agency in their static arrangement, spaces and urban arrangements are usually treated as collections of objects or volumes, not as actors. Yet the organization itself is active. It is doing something.

  Keller Easterling

  Concrete, Electrical, Perceive

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I used to hate the urban environment and the urban din. But I realize now that it's really not that much different than living next to a waterfall for wildlife. Most wildlife - unless they're specifically adapted - avoid being around a waterfall or whitewater streams and rivers because it jams their sense of surveillance. They are more vulnerable, and their message loses intelligibility. Now, the ouzel is able to overcome that in various ways. Back to the urban environment, we're talking and delivering messages as if we weren't next to a waterfall, and that's a problem.

  Gordon Hempton

  Hate, Overcoming, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In Africa, you cannot come into a comfortable material lifestyle without going through Christ. So many Africans say, "I'll take the whole package. That way I'm sure I'll get what I want." This is the compromise the rising urban class of Africa makes. Christianity is not seen as a soul-transforming device capable of producing redemption, but as a source of substantial material gratification.

  Malidoma Patrice Some

  Redemption, Compromise, Christianity

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• When I was younger, definitely getting people to listen to me and believe in me. I think it's hard when you're a young girl in a record label full of male urban artists, which is definitely what Atlantic Records was and still is. Also, getting people to trust a young, female pop star that doesn't just want to be puppeteered was definitely a challenge for me.

  Charli XCX

  Girl, Believe, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• We would like to have a great future, so we need to think about the urban philosophy, the urban problems, and the construction of the city. That's the new politics, maybe.

  Burhan Sonmez

  Philosophy, Thinking, Problem

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Most people just aren't clear-eyed about the rural South. We think that the urban centers are the problem, and the rural areas across the country are idyllic, suffused with good old American values, social values, religious values, moral values. It's what we tell ourselves to keep this political power structure in place, and it's what we see in pop culture, too.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Country, Religious, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Ironically, though our society of affluence brings safety and stability, it doesn't bring psychological health. As wealth goes up, suicide and depression rates tend to go up. I read one study that compared women in North America with women in Nigeria, and the group with the highest rates of depression was urban North American women, which is the wealthiest. Now, there are obviously huge stresses that come with poverty, but the poorer the society, the more collaborative people have to be.

  Sebastian Junger

  Suicide, Stress, People

  Source: www.oprah.com

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• There are masses of people who need affordable housing in New York. I think that, politically, it is very difficult to give preference to artists over another group. Now, could there be an impressive envisioning process where developers would be asked to collaborate with urban designers? Maybe envision a large-scale development with local shops, dense housing, maybe a few towers, maybe a few mid-rise buildings, and art workshops in the mix? That would be great. I don't see a call for those proposals. But I think that it would not be outrageous to propose that kind of vision.

  Sharon Zukin

  Art, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• When you go to urban America and you look at cities around America. People are moving back into the cities at record numbers. In the 1980s it was a flight to the suburbs. And now in 2017, it's a flight back into the cities.

  Marty Walsh

  Moving, People, Flight

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• I'm 13 to 17, 18 years old; I thought that's what the world was like. It never occurred to me that this was a very unusual period in music history. So I went on assuming that one day I'm going to have my band like my heroes had their own band. So people ask me this question all the time - they go, "Bass is basically a background instrument." The other thing is that in urban music, Black music, the bass has a much higher profile.

  Marcus Miller

  Hero, People, Black

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• My argument for that is: Why not create urban farms that are like parks, on public land? There actually is a park that I see as a model: Dover Street Park in Oakland. They took this park that has swings and playground-type things and turned it into a farm. There's not chickens, just annual vegetables interspersed with fruit trees. And it's super cool because you see people playing with their kids and then they go pick raspberries and some greens for dinner.

  Novella Carpenter

  Kids, People, Tree

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• Even if you live in New York City, you can have a little basil plant in your window, and that could be considered urban farming.

  Novella Carpenter

  Window, Farming, Plant

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• I think there's no question that the barriers, the fences and in certain urban areas, the walls, have had an important effect in terms of increasing the manageability and the security of the border. But in fact as Secretary of Homeland Security General John Kelly acknowledged at his confirmation hearing, walls and barriers alone are insufficient to insure security.

  Alan Bersin

  Wall, Thinking, Important

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• Why should we tie everyone's future to athletic success? I think organic farm has saved our school. It saved it because it changed the narrative of the institution. We're the first urban work college in the country. And so our students learn what it means to be effective and to have job skills and work skills.

  Michael Sorrell

  Country, School, Mean

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• We believe that colleges have a fundamental responsibility, if you're located in an urban area, to turn outward and address the needs of the communities you serve.

  Michael Sorrell

  Believe, Responsibility, College

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Sadly, in this country - maybe this is in the history of the world, really - it's the urban experience versus the bucolic experience. And it is different, but therein lies the slow progression of democracy. We are a melting pot.

  Walton Goggins

  Country, Lying, Democracy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I went to South Africa - Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg - and those were definitely the "I've arrived" shows. Outside of the money, the success, the accolades ... This is a place that we, in urban communities, never dream of. We never dream of Africa. Like, "Damn, this is the motherland." You feel it as soon as you touch down. That moment changed my whole perspective on how to convey my art.

  Kendrick Lamar

  Dream, Art, Perspective

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• L.A. as a geographical entity is very much a mixture of surf, desert, and the mountains, earthquakes and urban sprawl. Within an hour of driving, you can be out into the desert. I like that very much about living on the edge of a continent, conceptually is an interesting place to be. You're at this kind of juncture of a tectonic plate. The idea that the Pacific Ocean is right behind us, on a macro scale, is an interesting place to be.

  Michael C. McMillen

  Ocean, Interesting, Mountain

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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