American Cities Quotes

#1. There's no question that there's been a breach in the trust between urban - especially urban community, African-American and minority communities and the police in major American cities.

Mark Shields

#2. Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance.

Daniel Akaka

#3. The bottom line is that we have entered an age when local communities need to invest in themselves. Federal and state dollars are becoming more and more scarce for American cities. Political and civic leaders in local communities need to make a compelling case for this investment.

Mick Cornett

#4. I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.

Joseph Stiglitz

#5. True home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing;

William Gibson

#6. The notion of a defense that will protect American cities is one that will not be achieved, but it is that goal that supplies the political magic, as it were, in the president's vision.

James R. Schlesinger

#7. We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

Martin O'Malley

#8. San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.

Cecil Beaton

#9. China's ability to deliver nuclear warheads on American cities is expanding.

Lee H. Hamilton

#10. I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

Jack Kerouac

#11. Of all American cities of whatever size the most friendly on preliminary inspection, and on further acquaintance the most likable. The happiest-hearted, the gayest, the most care-free city on this continent.

Irvin S. Cobb

#12. The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness

J. Rufus Fears

#13. I personally object to the veil on aesthetic as well as other grounds; but I must admit that, for instance in the suburbs of American cities, I have often seen women attired more sloppily than our Persian women normally are.

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

#14. I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

P. J. O'Rourke

#15. Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided.

Jaime Lerner

#16. Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

Lewis H. Lapham

#17. Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that.

Darren Walker

#18. American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They're over-scaled.

James Howard Kunstler

#19. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.

Jack Kerouac

#20. I'd rather we were rebuilding Philadelphia, as opposed to Kabul ... There are American cities with serious infrastructure problems and we're not addressing them.

Mick Cornett

#21. In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.

Jane Jacobs

#22. Political corruption is endemic all over this country, in some places worse than others, right? On crime, you have all the major American cities where the crime rates at different points in their histories, have spiked dramatically.

Mitch Landrieu

#23. They (#ISIS) are going to be bombing American cities coming across from Mexico.

Duncan Hunter

#24. The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.

Timothy Noah

#25. If you look at people who seek a lot of care in American cities for multiple illnesses, it's usually people with a number of overwhelming illnesses and a lot of social problems, like housing instability, unemployment, lack of insurance, lack of housing, or just bad housing.

Paul Farmer

#26. Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.

Virginia Postrel

#27. Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.

H.L. Mencken

#28. If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.

Barbara Kruger

#29. New Orleans has a real spirit. It's the most authentic of all American cities.

Brad Pitt

#30. Well, first of all the Dominion Bureau of Statistics made a survey in the spring of 1970, which showed that on balance the difference in the cost of living between Canadian cities and American cities was 5 % to the advantage, of course, to the Canadian cities.

Leonard Woodcock

#31. Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.

Steven Johnson

#32. Even pigeons were once cherished in American cities, before all the handouts and garbage we've given them to eat allowed their numbers to explode. In 1878, the New York Times described pigeons as "honest birds" whose "right to feed in the street" was being challenged by sparrows. In

Jon Mooallem

#33. Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

Martin Filler

#34. Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York.

Fritz Leiber

#35. Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

William Gibson

#36. American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

William J. Mitchell

#37. The best way to get a sense of what kinds of emergencies might present themselves in your community is by contacting local chapters of the American Red Cross or offices of emergency management in the region or state. Most large cities will have their own offices of emergency management.

Irwin Redlener

#38. I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

Ralph Nader

#39. In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as "either France or Sweden" and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger.

Dave Barry

#40. The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today - Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia - even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten.

Simon Winchester

#41. I saw what I could [in Mexico City], but we rarely got anything other than big, mainstream American films.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

#42. I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

#43. Cities can be places that represent the best of our ideals: where Americans of all different backgrounds can come together and, through their interactions, and even through their unity, spawn true American greatness.

Cory Booker

#44. While different states and cities might look to different strategies for protecting public safety, we all can agree on this: we lose too many American lives to gun violence.

Martin O'Malley

#45. The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.

Charles E. Rosenberg

#46. 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

#47. Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier.

Robert Moses

#48. The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman.

Colin Ward

#49. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

Joseph McCarthy

#50. My ancestors come from a part of southern China where most villages can trace their roots back at least a thousand years or even more. However, as a typical American, I have lived in four cities and moved at least seven times.

Laurence Yep

#51. The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.

Darryl Pinckney

#52. The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families.

Star Parker

#53. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

David Simon

#54. The Hispanic culture is finding its way into the American culture. Places like Miami are going to be centers for that influence - places like Los Angeles and, certainly, cities in Texas.

Randy Falco

#55. [I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.

Daniel Dennett

#56. For starters, Portland isn't a great city to live in if you're a young, African American male with a lot of money,

Greg Oden

#57. American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

Jack Kemp

#58. Michigan is very racially separated and the city of Detroit itself is 84 percent African-American and the surrounding suburbs are 86 percent White.

Kwame Kilpatrick

#59. I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.

H.L. Mencken

#60. Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people. I'm supremely confident that Bostonians will pull together, take care of each other, and move forward as one proud city. And as they do, the American people will be with them every single step of the way.

Barack Obama

#61. A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome.

Philip Wylie

#62. Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people.

Charley Reese

#63. These urban provinces, new to the American scene, possess greater economic, social, and cultural unity than most of the states. Yet, subdivided into separate municipalities...they face grave difficulties in meeting the essential needs of the aggregate population.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.

#64. There is no presence of the American columns in the city of Baghdad at all. We besieged them and we killed most of them.

Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

#65. Frank Sinatra was the voice of the 20th-century American city.

Pete Hamill

#66. Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#67. I bow my head to the victims of terrorism. I am highly impressed of the courage of New York residents. The great city and the great American nation are to win!

Vladimir Putin

#68. Buffalo is one of America's great designed cities. The interweaving of great architecture, landscape architecture and important historic sites makes Buffalo a must see destination for preservationists, designers, history buffs, and anyone wishing to see an inspiring example of American design.

Richard Moe

#69. I know some in the media think conservatives don't care about the cities, but they're wrong. We believe that every American and in every community has a right to pursue happiness.

Jeb Bush

#70. Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. In his defense, he probably just thought it was an American city because there were so many Mexicans there.

Jay Leno

#71. The news in Europe, West and East, is still showing America in flames, flood, etc. Cities are shown underwater; befuddled American officials are shown trying to explain why we are winning the war on terrorism.

Richard Reeves

#72. Let us never forget the greatest untapped market for American enterprise is right here in America, in the inner cities, in the rural areas.

William J. Clinton

#73. The real illness of the American city today, and especially of the deprived groups within it, is voicelessness.

John Henry Cox

#74. Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.

Archibald MacLeish

#75. It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue.

Bill Taylor

#76. Major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

Michelle Alexander

#77. The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they're still back at home.
I saw it as a place for lost souls.

Amy Plum

#78. I ended up training only for four years before I was accepted into American Ballet Theater in New York City.

Misty Copeland

#79. If we want to improve American food and make it much cheaper, we should deregulate the food trucks and the other street vendors, provided they meet certain sanitation standards. Many cities have already moved down this path, and people are not keeling over with salmonella.

Tyler Cowen

#80. Nobody is denying we should investigate and do what we can to prevent gun crime in our cities and towns. But, we should not scapegoat the American gun owner for complicated, cultural problems we are just beginning to understand.

Bob Barr

#81. I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.

William Finnegan

#82. Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

Moshe Safdie

#83. I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities, but I forgot what it was. I have it written down at home somewhere.

David Byrne

#84. It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans.

Ray Nagin

#85. Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.

Darin Strauss

#86. This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America. This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people.

Mitt Romney

#87. Get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I've jotted down a few of them. Objects create happiness. The animals are pleased to be of use. Your cities will shine forever. Death will not touch you.

Jenny Offill

#88. In China's big cities, American products - say, for instance, Proctor and Gamble shampoos or many other goods - are widely coveted by a lot of Chinese consumers.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#89. I love the fact that a lot of my audience is people from the inner city. African-Americans love my films.

Wes Craven

#90. Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.

Chief Seattle

#91. Out of 30 years of Second City I was probably the third African-American with the main stage cast. I was surprised when I first heard that. I think part of the reason that improvisation has never been popular with African-Americans is that it isn't popular in the inner cities.

Tim Meadows

#92. I'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is.

John Green

#93. Many cities make music, but no city breathes music quite like Memphis. The songs and sounds that come from here are uniquely American.

Shawn Amos

#94. Perhaps the most typically American place in America.

James Bryce

#95. Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady

Norman Mailer

#96. I played with Joey Mullen back in Salt Lake City before he got called up to St. Louis. He was the first player ever to score 20 goals in the American League and 20 in the NHL. I've kept in contact with him and he's a great guy.

Alain Vigneault

#97. [Chicago] is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other superlatives, but it is a "world" city, more European in some respects than American.

John Gunther

#98. No other American city is so intensely American as New York.

Anthony Trollope

#99. In the 19th century, Berlin was called the German Chicago. Or Chicago was called the American Berlin because they were sort of new cities or new powerhouses.

Darryl Pinckney

#100. There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence?

Max Blumenthal