An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
Friedrich Nietzsche – City, Paris
City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
Henry David Thoreau – City
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
Aristotle – City
Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Cities, Growth
Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Cities
How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
Walter Benjamin – Cities
The city exists as a series of doubles; it has official and hidden cultures, it is a real place and site of imagination. Its elaborate network of streets, housing, public buildings, transport systems, parks, and shops is paralleled by a complex of attitudes, habits, customs, expectancies, and hopes that reside in us as urban subjects. We discover that urban ‘reality’ is not single but multiple, that inside the city there is always another city.
Ian Chambers – the city
Cities have always had cultures in the sense that they have produced distinctive cultural products, artifacts, buildings and distinctive ways of life
Mike Featherstone-cities
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
Benjamin Disraeli – City, Civilization
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
Margaret Mead – What is a city?
Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.
Jean Baudrillard – Cities & Charm
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
Benjamin Disraeli – A Great City
Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man
On cities
From this point look above the roofs of the city, and imagine! Our landscape was as manufactured as that of any great French or English park. But we walked in a garden of hell, among trees, some still without popular names, whose seeds had sometimes been brought to our island in the instetines of slaves.
