Building Cities Quotes

#1. Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

Philip Johnson

#2. The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear ... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away ... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

Umberto Eco

#3. I hate nature. I really do. Nature is composed entirely of sticks, dirt, fall-down places, biting and stinging things, and savageries too numerous to list. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Man has been building cities since the year oughty-ought, just to get away from this stuff.

Sue Grafton

#4. Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy.

Mark Zuckerberg

#5. The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

Lewis Mumford

#6. The City that God is building for you and me, not even death can pass its gates! God's City of Tomorrow, His garden of the gods, will have no pain nor death nor sorrow!

David Berg

#7. When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.

Vladimir Lenin

#8. I'm building shopping centers and movie theaters in the inner cities. So that means supplying jobs and letting blacks understand that we have to build our communities back, not looking to anybody else.

Magic Johnson

#9. If we can develop and design streets so that they are wonderful, fulfilling places to be - community-building places, attractive for all people - then we will have successfully designed about one-third of the city directly and will have had an immense impact on the rest.

Allan Jacobs

#10. The Empire State Building is the closest thing to heaven in this city.

Deborah Kerr

#11. There is no greater symbol of the artistic spirit of Scotland than the Mackintosh building. But more than that it is a symbol of where art belongs, rising as it does out of the heart of a great city. A mighty castle on a hill, it is a part of me, and of all Glaswegians.

Peter Capaldi

#12. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

Rick Yancey

#13. If every citizen can get rid of indiscipline syndrome, we have immense potential to build more productive, conflict-free, harmonious and peaceful communities, societies, cities, nations and world.

Vishwas Chavan

#14. Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

Jane Jacobs

#15. Hamburg will have a new and important attraction with which it can distinguish itself from other cities. But the important thing is that activities should not just be limited to the building, but that the concert hall should symbolize a general mood of creative rejuvenation.

Charles Landry

#16. I think an artist has the potential to investigate both form and content within one activity, to show that there can be coherence between form and values in our society, as in thinking about a city and building one.

Olafur Eliasson

#17. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls

Aristophanes

#18. There's a weird fact that if you dropped a penny off the Empire State Building in New York City, you'd kill someone. I feel really bad, 'cause I dropped a nickel off it once.

Taylor Hanson

#19. Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

Richard Rogers

#20. One of the challenges that Vancouver and cities across the country are facing is that we don't have a federal partner in terms of building for transit, not in the way we need.

Justin Trudeau

#21. One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

Rem Koolhaas

#22. The modern human has mastered the art of building toxic homes and cities.

Steven Magee

#23. Oklahoma City bombing was done on purpose. Did you know the Federal Government blew up their own building to blame it on the militias and to get rid of some people that weren't cooperating with the system?

Kent Hovind

#24. If you go to a building to skate, or if you go to these places to skate, you're told it's against the law in some cities. It's definitely a bummer. It's unfortunate.

Shaun White

#25. Building the scene, going out and doing shows and connecting with the fans, cultivating the fanbase in all these cities. I'm very glad that it's happening.

A-Trak

#26. Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war; and this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.

Aristophanes

#27. In Islamic theology, the phallic symbol is very important. Your biggest phallic symbol is New York City and your tallest building will be the phallic symbol they will hit.

Isser Harel

#28. Play is under attack in our nation's schools - and shrinking recess periods are only part of the problem. Homework is increasing. Cities are building new schools without playgrounds. Safety concerns are prompting bans of tag, soccer, and even running on the schoolyard.

Darell Hammond

#29. The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

Alex Steffen

#30. The first Care in building of Cities, is to make them airy and well perflated; infectious Distempers must necessarily be propagated amongst Mankind living close together.

John Arbuthnot

#31. What do I want in a good fantasy book? Court politics and social interactions based around houses and cities. Powerful women and devious men. Drama and action with emotional ramifications. Frocks. Kissing. Swords. An intense impression of history in the world-building.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

#32. Why do we insist on building the largest and most impressive structures in our city when people on the other side of town are hungry, jobless and worshipping in storefronts?

K.P. Yohannan

#33. I saw that Donald Trump is selling his penthouse suite at the Trump Park Avenue building here in New York City for $21 million. When asked why he's selling it now, Trump said 'Hey, Americans seem to be buying everything else I'm selling, so why not strike while the iron's hot.'

Jimmy Fallon

#34. In the, uh, '30s and '40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City. I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.

Al Kooper

#35. Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.

Jamshyd Godrej

#36. The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.

Jane Addams

#37. When you think of what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities and all the good it's done in the world, it's kind of disheartening to hear so much hatred of America, not just from abroad, but internally.

Frank Miller

#38. The practical answer is, no it would be totally impossible for young or foreign people to get access to roof of a building that stands in the heart of a giant city and to put a cable across.

Philippe Petit

#39. Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

Jane Jacobs

#40. Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized.

Ban Ki-moon

#41. The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.

Ada Louise Huxtable

#42. The redemption of Zion is more than the purchase or recovery of lands, the building of cities, or even the founding of nations. It is the conquest of the heart, the subjugation of the soul, the sanctifying of the flesh, the purifying and ennobling of the passions.

Orson F. Whitney

#43. We're becoming a planet of a thousand new major cities. The economy of the 21st century is a city-building economy. It's within our power to make it a carbon zero one, too; and to be blunt, civilization depends on our success.

Alex Steffen