cities Quotes

“How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”

“Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.”

“I had forgotten how gently time passes in Paris. As lively as the city is, there’s a stillness to it, a peace that lures you in. In Paris, with a glass of wine in your hand, you can just be.”

“There is the situation of the city—to find a place where nothing need be imported is wellnigh impossible.”

“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.”

“The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again.”

“Every city is a living body.”

“In my mind, I was one of the London’s young, thrusting urbanities. In my mind, I was always on the go, always had somewhere to be, always in the thick of things.”

“Why, there’s my grandkids now.” She pointed us out with a spatula. “They’re from Chicago. Gangs run that town, you know,” she told the kid. “My grandson’s in a gang, so you don’t want to mess with him. He’s meaner than he looks.”

“Got a new pet?” I inquired. “Chicago people have pets,” she said. “But there’s a new litter living down in the cobhouse now, and I let ‘em. They keep down the vermin. Don’t need all of them though.”

“The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.”

“There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

“The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet.”

“I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away . . . Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us.”

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”

“From these things it is evident, then, that the city belongs among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.”

“The regime is an arrangement of a city with respect to its offices, particularly the one that has authority over all matters.”

“Let us presuppose this much, that the best way of life both separately for each individual and in common for cities is that accompanied by virtue—virtue that is equipped to such an extent as to allow them to take part in actions that accord with virtue.”

″ In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless.”

The UK is struck by a devastating nuclear attack. Cities and communication systems are destroyed, roads melted, the earth and air poisoned and ravaged. All seen through the eyes of Mr and Mrs Bloggs living alone in the countryside, who are a bit peeved the milkman hasn’t came yet.

“If that city, which he had seen, had not sunk into the sea again, then it would perhaps become as dilapidated as this one in a little while. Perhaps it could not have withstood time and decay, but would have stood there with roofless churches and bare houses and desolate, empty streets–just like this one. Then it was better that it should re- main in all its glory down in the deep.”