Top 69 City Building Quotes
#1. Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.
Jane Jacobs
#2. One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe
Tom Turner
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. A city building, you experience when you walk; a suburban building, you experience when you drive.
Helmut Jahn
#6. 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
#7. Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#8. The Empire State Building is the closest thing to heaven in this city.
Deborah Kerr
#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. I just love building buildings. I'm the largest developer in New York City. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. I think I've never had more fun. I'm just enjoying my life.
Donald Trump
#11. 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
#12. These were wild aromas, far from the schoolroom, church building, or city. Like a secret handshake, these smells meant you were among a higher class. Men who were the best men Wilder knew. The kind of man he wanted, and intended, to be.
S.J. Dahlstrom
#13. Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.
Richard Meier
#14. 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
#15. My kitchen in New York City is in the Richard Meier building on Perry Street, so it's ultra-modern: white, glass and transparent. It's 180 square feet, with an induction stove. Everything's hidden, so you don't see the microwave or the fridge.
Jean-Georges Vongerichten
#16. The city they are building asks you to stay; remind yourself what is worth keeping, while the lighthouse of your moan warns the ship of your heart that he is a stone.
Mikl Paul
#17. The fact that Newark is having poetry festivals and peace conferences - all of these things are building an undeniable thesis that our city is making incredible strides forward.
Cory Booker
#18. There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city.
Janine Benyus
#19. But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce.
Lanford Wilson
#20. Roads are necessary, but the fact that we don't fully recognize that when you build a road you're doing more than building a road - you're building the future development of your city. And, that's what's never dawned on people. It still doesn't, in a way.
Richard Lamm
#21. 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
#22. Fiorello LaGuardia saved City Center. The real man saved it, and he made this building into a performing arts venue.
Kate Baldwin
#23. 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
#24. The sunrise sky was creeping over the edge of the city in orange-and-scarlet striations, and the clocks were or were not chiming seven.
Scott Lynch
#25. The whole of history since the ascension of Jesus into heaven is concerned with one work only: the building and perfecting of this City of God.
Augustine Of Hippo
#26. 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
#27. You know, I said in the U.N., I said to President Abbas, 'Look, we're in the same city, we're in the same building, for God's sake, the U.N. Let's just sit down and begin to talk peace.'
Benjamin Netanyahu
#28. 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
#29. I think you need to, as an architect, understand the essence of a place and create a building that feels like it resonates with the culture of a place. So my buildings in India or in Kansas City or in Arkansas or in Singapore, they come out different because the places are so different.
Moshe Safdie
#30. The Lord Jesus Christ is preparing a home fit for all who live for Him, a place designed for the church triumphant. Let's exemplify the work of His hands, for they are busy, on our behalf, building a city large enough to encompass His people of faith - an eternal home for the soul.
Billy Graham
#31. The private sector is growing so incredibly in India, in every city you have industries for whom building a concert hall would be nothing financially. But they just don't do it.
Zubin Mehta
#32. We've already seen how it's going to come in, in a truck, like it did at Oklahoma City at the Federal building or it's going to come in by plane, like it did at the World Trade Center.
Richard Drew
#33. But you're out of another world old kid ... You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.
John Dos Passos
#34. One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.
Rem Koolhaas
#35. If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres - the height of a twenty-storey building - and every coastal city in the world would be inundated.
Bill Bryson
#36. The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. ... where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings? (pp.281-82)
Sarah Turnbull
#37. 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
#38. Being the gateway to a large city, St. Louis, I had felt from the very beginning that somehow this building should symbolize this sense of being a gateway.
Minoru Yamasaki
#39. Invite the best and brightest to compete for a grand prize to come up with designs, including new zoning, building codes and so forth, for New Orleans that could make it safe from water, and let the state and city pick the plan that works best for Louisiana.
Billy Tauzin
#40. The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores - like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city's skin.
Markus Zusak
#41. 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
#42. (I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a "unit.")
Ayn Rand
#43. He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, You'll see it lovely. I never will. But it WILL be lovely.
Erik Larson
#44. And that summer, as Hurricane Ella made its way toward the city, an emergency crew worked at night under veil of secrecy to weld two-inch-thick steel plates around the two hundred critical bolts, and the building was secured. The Citicorp tower has stood solidly ever since. The
Atul Gawande
#45. The heart of a city
Is the soul of a man
It winds like a river
Through the heart of the land
They can tear down a building
They can tear down a park
They can strike at a symbol
But they can't strike the heart
Janis Ian
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I belong here, I tell Toy. I'm hungry for every city block. Every brick building. Every crowded intersection. Electric. I feel brand new.
Erica Lorraine Scheidt
#50. Guilt accretes. It builds and builds, whittling stairways and spires in the heart until a person can carry a city of hopelessness inside them.
My guilt was building a universe.
Roshani Chokshi
#51. In a building with apartments, of course, you want to make connections. Life is easier that way. There's salt if you don't have salt; you can knock at someone's door, like in any city. But you know, you can hear the others, and you want to sleep, you get annoyed.
Juliette Binoche
#52. From the street below, the SYLK Institute building resembled a perfectly faceted aquamarine obelisk, rising from the cracked concrete and asphalt of the nation's capital city.
Jonathan Marker
#53. Would you think me such a fool that you could be here, in this city, this building, this room and me not know about it?
Jessica Shirvington
#54. Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
Wallace Stevens
#55. The classical city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the market place and the temple.
Jane Addams
#56. Jerry Orbach was the first person to take me to the Friars Club. It's a beautiful building, and you walk into these halls of comedic history and meet these old cats who could tell you a million stories about how things went down in New York City.
Jesse L. Martin
#57. Surely, if Mother Nature had been consulted, she would never have consented to building a city in New Orleans.
Mortimer Zuckerman
#58. Planning a garden, park, building, or city shouldn't be done in an office.
Jack Dangermond
#59. 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
#61. I am all for greening tall buildings, but I'm also very keen to note that greening a building doesn't cope with the problem of the tall building in the texture of the city.
Joseph Rykwert
#62. The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disappointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must.
Kingsley Amis
#63. A home is not a building or a street or a city or something so artificial as bricks and mortar. A home is where one's family is ...
John Boyne
#64. There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.
Jane Jacobs
#65. Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Eric Garner
#66. It looks scary. And reminds me of the street that is usually the first we see in Vice City. You know after the first meeting when the guy plans to do his first job? The street on which the building of his first client is? Well, that particular street.
Ritika Chhabra
#67. We played this game from the west village to the upper east side til around midnight when the Chrysler building was far behind us and we weren't sure if we were in love anymore.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#68. The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas.
Vincent Scully
#69. Fun fact: The United Nations building in New York City is the only place in all of North America where smoking is still permitted indoors.
Douglas Coupland
