Top 100 Great City Quotes
#1. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.
David Maraniss
#2. Among the noblest in the land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#3. Chicago's such a great city because it's got so many different brilliantly architecturally looking buildings, and you can really modify that city.
Charles Roven
#4. He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#5. A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
Walt Whitman
#6. As a citizen of the great city of Chicago, I find it impossible to root against the White Sox. The White Sox organization has been much more consistent, in my lifetime at least, at putting a winning ballclub on the field.
Billy Corgan
#8. No great city has an abundance of parking.
Yves Engler
#9. Kolkata is a great city, has great food and great people. We had some problems finding the kind of old buildings we were looking for, and even handling the crowds, but on the whole it was fun shooting there.
Sanjay Dutt
#10. I seriously love Cleveland. It's a great city.
Brendon Urie
#11. Yeah, I don't think you can live anywhere else
it's such a great city [New York]. L.A. is kind of a necessary evil, but man, I love going back to New York.
Will Arnett
#12. So the swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets ...
Oscar Wilde
#13. I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#14. If we're going to talk about transport, I would say that the great city is not the one that has highways, but one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can go safely everywhere.
Enrique Penalosa
#15. Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.
Laura Miller
#16. I have always believed that every great city in history needs a vibrant center.
Eli Broad
#17. After 9/11, I was like many people in New York City and got a little depressed. I began to check myself into The Waldorf Astoria for room service, movies and just to chill. I wanted to contribute to the great city of Manhattan.
Kristin Chenoweth
#18. The great city can teach something that no university by itself can altogether impart: a vivid sense of the largeness of human brotherhood, a vivid sense of man's increasing obligation to man; a vivid sense of our absolute dependence on one another.
Seth Low
#19. The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.
Malcolm McLaren
#20. Here's what I see all across this great city - people working together to make Boston a better place to live and to raise children, to grow and pursue dreams.
Thomas Menino
#21. Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.
Jonah
#22. I have a fond place in my heart for Seattle, so I hope that an NBA team comes back to this great city, this great sports city.
Magic Johnson
#24. I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#25. Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
Winston Churchill
#26. It is a tough city to live in (Detroit) but a great city to be around. There is so much promise. There just needs to be a movement to help push the city beyond the automobile industry. The music business needs to learn how to support itself.
MC Serch
#27. Chennai is a great city, and if they had great weather it could be paradise, but it is not. Everything is top volume,be it heat, humidity, or crowd's ability to whistle. It is not a place for faint hearted
Yuvraj Singh
#28. They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.
Salman Rushdie
#29. 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
#30. If you ask the great city, 'Who is this person?,' she will answer, 'He is my child.
Victor Hugo
#31. Nothing will ever take away the power and resolve and fearlessness of the great city of Boston. We will get through this. It will take time. But we will get through this.
Joey McIntyre
#32. Portland is a really great city, especially because I'm a shopper and there's no sales tax! That really adds up so fast, because in California, a $1000 pair of shoes ends up costing another $100.
Bitsie Tulloch
#33. To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other ... Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.
Michel De Certeau
#34. The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.
Lewis Mumford
#35. Imagine how titanic an echo chamber this great city would seem without the noise of eve none of mine. A huge bronze bell deprived of one hidden small iron clapper, its sole reason for being, its single means of song.
Allan Gurganus
#36. No great city has ever been known for its abundant supply of parking.
Allan Jacobs
#38. His son had gone astray in the great city, where so many others had gone astray before him, and where many others would go astray after him, until there was found some great secret that as yet no man had discovered.
Alan Paton
#39. What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Charles Baudelaire
#40. They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city, know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see the town.
Samuel Johnson
#42. Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.
Marie Curie
#43. We're proud of the work we're doing to make Chicago a great city for people of all ages. Nothing's more important than keeping in mind the needs of older adults - and how valuable a role they play in improving the city, based on their amazing collective talent and wisdom.
Rahm Emanuel
#44. A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
Aristotle.
#45. I never rebel so much against France as not to regard Paris with a friendly eye; she has had my heart since my childhood ... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world.
Michel De Montaigne
#46. 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
#47. In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money ... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.
Laura Miller
#48. I come back home almost every weekend, or my wife comes up every other weekend to Vancouver. So, in that sense, we make it work. It's just a great city. It's a great country. They've been good to me, and I have no problems being up there.
Michael Trucco
#49. The buildings of the great city of Placeholder sprawled either side of the dark crack of the river like boils on buttocks. There
Barnaby Yard
#50. The Yankees won the pennant, we went on to the World Series, 41 years after that in the city of Toronto. The great city of Toronto, and all the provinces in Canada, everybody reached out and they were excited because we won the first World Series ever, across the border.
Dave Winfield
#51. The spirit of rebellion is present in every great city, and the great task of wise government is to keep it dormant, for if it wakes it is a torrent which no dam can hold back.
Giacomo Casanova
#52. L.A.'s a great city in a lot of ways. There's a lot of great weather here. I know some good people.
Tahmoh Penikett
#53. The universe is but one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.
Epictetus
#54. I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.
Laurence Olivier
#55. I used to do my Nelson Mandela voice to blag restaurant tables in Cape Town. It rarely worked. Now what a great city that is.
Rory Bremner
#56. I've very proud to be mayor of our great city. It's a city with a heart and a soul. Chicago has a unique spirit. Our business community wants to give back.
Richard M. Daley
#57. A great city may be seen as the construction of words as well as stone.
Yi-Fu Tuan
#58. My commitment is to Los Angeles, so whatever helps this continue to be a great city, that's what I would be focused to do, and the Dodgers are certainly iconic to Los Angeles.
Patrick Soon-Shiong
#59. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#60. I used to go to Maple Leafs games all the time when Nic shot To Die For here in Toronto. This is a great city. I love it here.
Tom Cruise
#61. If you've been to Moscow, it's a really exciting and great city, but it still feels like you should be a little careful about which way you're going to step.
Kenneth Branagh
#62. There is something more annoying than pleasant in finding neighbors from back home chiselling in on your own exclusive New York. It mitigates your triumph in having conquered the great city and brings home the ungratifying truth that anyone can do it.
Dawn Powell
#63. New York is a great city. There is no question of that. It's such a diverse city. I've walked down the city and heard four or five different languages simultaneously. I think that's beautiful.
Patti Smith
#64. Here is the great city: here have you nothing to seek and everything to lose.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. We have to have armies! We have to have military power! We have to have police forces, whether it's police in a great city or police in an international scale to keep those madmen from taking over the world and robbing the world of its liberties.
Billy Graham
#66. All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization ... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.
Aldous Huxley
#67. Boston was a great city to grow up in, and it probably still is. We were surrounded by two very important elements: academia and the arts. I was surrounded by theater, music, dance, museums. And I learned how to sail on the Charles River. So I had a great childhood in Boston. It was wonderful.
Leonard Nimoy
#68. In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.
Nicole Mones
#69. I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and longed to go and seek there the key of all mysteries, thinking that I might find there a new life, perhaps some great city where life should be grander and richer - and then it struck me that life may be grand enough even in a prison.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#70. 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
#71. What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them?
P.G. Wodehouse
#72. That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.
Ilka Chase
#73. 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
#74. To be in Boston, which is a great city and which is full of many colleges and young kids, and to be around that many people that were at the same point in their lives, who played guitar or whatever instrument - it was just perfect. It was a great environment.
John Petrucci
#75. In essence, the Mexica remained little more than a band of pirates, sallying forth from their great city to loot and plunder and to submit vast areas to tribute payment, without altering the essential social constitution of their victims
Eric Wolf
#76. In every great city, with all its gleaming walls and massive libraries, with all the shimmering fountains and sculptured gardens, there is a superfluity of dung that must be carted out.
Jeff Wheeler
#77. I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.
Siegfried Sassoon
#78. I think it's a great city. I think it's a fabulous city. But in my young juvenile days, I was an idiot, and I bought 30 cars. And I need to drive those cars, and New York isn't really the place you can do that.
Shaquille O'Neal
#79. There is no solitude more dreadful for a stranger, an isolated man, than a great city; so many thousands of men and not one friend.
Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste
#80. When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an ouverture.
Graham Greene
#81. We need a mayor who knows how to balance a budget, who understands the urgency of delivering all the services that a great city needs, who understand the need of working families.
Carolyn Maloney
#82. The great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation that five times the population of any other portion of the country.
Malcolm Forbes
#83. In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.
Tom Peters
#84. And then 45 years later, as I finished my career in the great city of Cleveland, that was another great way to end my career, going to the World Series.
Dave Winfield
#85. A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
P.D. James
#86. A great city with water barriers and no bridges is like a skyscraper with no elevators. Bridges are a monument to progress.
Joseph Straus
#87. A great city is the place to escape the true drama of provincial life, and find solace in fantasy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#88. I love Philadelphia. I was shocked at what a great city this is. For me, it is the cat's pajamas. I love everything about it. I love where I live. I love the people. I have been met with such kindness and affection here.
George Dzundza
#89. I'm really enjoying living in Los Angeles. It's a great city to live in. I'm living a very suburban domesticated lifestyle out there - a two bedroomed little bungalow with two cars, and we're just driving around, going to meetings here and there - it's lovely!
Ioan Gruffudd
#90. New York always brings out the serial killer in me. It's a great city to kill in. The best. You've got something like fifteen million people living cheek by jowl, and most of them couldn't give a damn about anyone else. No one wants to get involved. No one cares.
Stephen Leather
#91. The whole inside of the Pyramid on the ground level on the New Earth is one great Garden within the City, a great City Park!-His Heavenly Fair in His Heaven so fair!
David Berg
#92. When sinners are careless and stupid, and sinking into hell unconcerned, it is time the church should bestir themselves. It is as much the duty of the church to awake, as it is for the firemen to awake when a fire breaks out in the night in a great city.
Charles Grandison Finney
#93. I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he's an American child.
Richard M. Nixon
#94. I love Calgary. It's a great city. I enjoyed my time there, quite a bit. Shooting and filming in that cold could be very difficult, at times. When you're shooting nights, and it's 3 in the morning and minus 35 degrees, that's hard to work in.
Colin Hanks
#95. The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
Walt Whitman
#96. At forty-five degrees, the sky will burn. Fire to approach the great new city; in an instant, a great scattered flame will leap up, when one will want to get evidence from the Normans.
Nostradamus
#97. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
Jane Austen
#99. I moved away when I was young, when I was about 19. I'd literally come from an area with dirt roads and stuff like that, right to the centre of a city of about five million people. It's been great. I'm based in New York, and every day, it's amazing.
Diego Klattenhoff
#100. Hong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene.
Invader
