Our City Quotes

#1. Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

Lewis Buzbee

#2. The city's legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, "Our Carter," even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare.

Erik Larson

#3. What the mayors care about is, 'How can I get money to invest in the infrastructure in my city? How do we put people back to work, lower the unemployment rate, provide for job training programs? How do we make class sizes smaller and make investments in our children from an education standpoint?'

Michael Nutter

#4. By August 2008, we had left Voikovskaya and moved into a wooden dacha in the artists' colony of Sokol in north-west Moscow. The house was a haven amid the madness of the city: lily of the valley grew near our front gate, Virginia creeper decked the green picket fence.

Luke Harding

#5. In the event of fire in any of the public buildings troops would be of vast service in the protection of public property, and should insurrection break out the protection of life and property would be more safe guarded by our company of regulars, than by the whole City.

Thomas L. Smith

#6. The strength that comes from human collaboration is the central truth behind civilisation's success and the primary reason why cities existwe must free ourselves from our tendency to see cities as their buildings, and remember that the real city is made of flesh, not concrete.

Edward Glaeser

#7. It's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making it the city of all cities most like Man himself - loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth.

Nelson Algren

#8. 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

#9. We have in effect renounced our Worldly citizenship when we receive the King of Kings and the Prince of Peace, Lord of Lords, God of Heaven, Son of Righteousness and the Kingdom of Heaven into our hearts, and have made the Heavenly City our Home!

David Berg

#10. 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

#11. Give me excess of love, whatever it costs. We pay with our souls, and if we die with our souls intact we know we haven't loved enough.

Louise Carey

#12. We all need the living green or we'll shrivel up inside. To make the modern city livable is the task of our times.

Jens Jensen

#13. In the city, I wake bolt upright in the small hours, convinced that intruders are marauding through our apartment despite Swiss bank-style security arrangements.

Mariella Frostrup

#14. After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.

David Cameron

#15. How would we flood village and city with our information? The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn't tell them?

Frank Herbert

#16. What has been happening the last four years in City Hall is that they have been closing recreation centers, closing libraries. We have not looked after our children in City Hall.

Carl Stokes

#17. Looking good is important. We're our own premium brand as professional athletes, so you want to be thoughtful about presentation and represent yourself and your city and sport as best you can.

C. J. Wilson

#18. Simon-But werewolfs don't like our kind! Jordan-I do. It's his kind I don't like. They think they're better than everyone else. Jace-No, I think I'm better than everybody else. City of Fallen Angels- Jace, Simon, and Jordan.

Cassandra Clare

#19. 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

#20. Inner city education must change. Our responsibility is not merely to provide access to knowledge; we must produce educated people.

James L. Farmer Jr.

#21. Philadelphia loves its team, and being able to win a World Series for the city, fans, players and our Phillies organization meant so much to me.

Pat Gillick

#22. Once in royal David's city Stood a lowly cattle shed, Where a Mother laid her Baby In a manger for His bed: Mary was that Mother mild Jesus Christ her little Child ... With the poor, and mean, and lowly, Lived on earth our Savior Holy.

Cecil Frances Alexander

#23. Obligation
They cannot ask for kindness
Or for mercy plead,
Yet cruel is our blindness
Which does not see their need,
World-over, town or city,
God trusts us with this task:
To give our love and pity
To those who cannot ask.

Edgar A. Guest

#24. There is something universal about being stood up in a city restaurant between one and two - a spiritual no-man's-land, whose blasted trees, entrenchments, and ratholes we all share, disarmed by the gullibility of our hearts.

John Cheever

#25. Our lives follow the stories we tell ourselves.

Gina Greenlee

#26. Those 3,000 jobs in Sioux Falls, based on our population back then in Sioux Falls, would have taken 300,000 jobs in New York City to equal it at Citibank.

Bill Janklow

#27. I was like so many others passion-ately involved in trying to bring those truths to the world's attention. We did our very best to peacefully do that. The city, state, and federal governments did their very best to quell our efforts. They were used to using heavy-handed tactics to silence us.

Leonard Peltier

#28. The world is yet in its infancy; the gracious designs of God are yet hardly developed. Glorious things are spoken of Zion, the city of our God. She is yet to triumph and become the joy and glory of the whole earth.

Adoniram Judson

#29. Government and politics isn't like a reality TV show. It's not about voting the bad guys out of the house. You know, it's about what do we need to take our country or our state or our city forward? And people, frankly, would be well advised to really get back into understanding politics.

Campbell Newman

#30. In the Shadow of Slavery covers two and a half centuries of black life in New York City, and skillfully interweaves the categories of race and class as they affected the formation of African American identity. Leslie Harris has made a major contribution to our understanding of the black experience.

Eric Foner

#31. I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

Bernie Mac

#32. My grandfather sold insurance to King Farouk of Egypt. And my savta's parents helped found the city of Tel Aviv in 1906. Our family name used to be Mizrahi, but they changed it to Mayron, which means 'happy water' in Hebrew.

Melanie Mayron

#33. For what fortress, what city, in the wide extent of the Roman empire, can hope to exist, secure and impregnable, if it is our pleasure that it should be erased from the earth?

Attila The Hun

#34. Transportation is an essential part of our lives, and in New York City where driving is not a viable option most of the time, public transportation and taxis are the only way to get around.

Simi Linton

#35. The Potemkin city of which I wish to speak here is none other than our dear Vienna herself.

Adolf Loos

#36. That was such an important time for us, as a team. It was our second gold medal in a row, following Salt Lake City, and really established ourselves as the best team in the world.

Hayley Wickenheiser

#37. Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world's diversity and represents the finest in human achievements.

Narendra Modi

#38. 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

#39. I see the world as a temporary site-specific installation, structures, infrastructures, the foundation of our sense of belonging and our identity, seen from afar, as a great scale model: the city as an avatar of itself.

Olivo Barbieri

#40. I feel like your city - with hip hop in particular, because we're always beating our chest and shouting where we're from - your city is just as influential as your parents. Even the grimy, hardcore gangster rap from New York - KRS-One and Wu Tang, the stuff acknowledges it.

Talib Kweli

#41. The young men in the inner city are without guidance, robbing and shooting each other with no remorse ... Our system is crazy because we're planning to fail. Everybody needs something to grasp on to.

Lamar Odom

#42. There are people walking around the streets of Kansas City who are unemployed, while one of our largest employers is not only sending jobs aboard, but then turning around and making a statement about preserving jobs.

Emanuel Cleaver

#43. We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.

Michael Bloomberg

#44. Singapore is an international city, and it would be a grave mistake to close our doors.

Tony Tan

#45. However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.

Richard Ernst

#46. Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War.

Philip Roth

#47. Travel plucks us out of the worn routines of our lives and plops us down into a new culture, language, or city, and lets us figure life out. It strips the excess away and melts us down to our core. It teaches us that stuff doesn't make us happy - only experiences and being present do that.

Fred Perrotta

#48. I was running for mayor of Syracuse - the first woman to run for mayor in our city, or in New York, and one of the first in the United States. I was known for my strong conservation plank. In 1969, the term 'conservation' was hardly on the tip of every citizen's tongue.

Karen DeCrow

#49. We had heard that the people of Delhi loved their city as bees love flowers. But we could not believe that the child of a courtesan would prefer to live in a Delhi brothel rather than in our palace in Iran!

Khushwant Singh

#50. I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn't. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.

Jan Koum

#51. Chase shook his head, his jaw set stubbornly. "You say that our responsibilities to the city have to come first. Not for me. My mate has to come first, every time.

Zoe Chant

#52. Yet again, the family of a young black man is grieving a life cut short. Yet again, the streets of an American city are marred by violence. What we have seen in Baltimore should, indeed I think does, tear at our soul.

Hillary Clinton

#53. We had a branding problem. We have allowed ourselves to be branded by our tragedies. If you said 'Oklahoma City,' chances are the next word out of your mouth was 'bombing.'

Mick Cornett

#54. Another funny thing about living in this city is how easy it can be to lose track of people. We're all so busy, always rushing around, so wrapped up in our own stuff. It stops occurring to us to check in with friends. I mean REALLY check in with them.

Ryan Kelly

#55. Our Lord never called His people to help build the tower of Babel in the hope of getting a Bible study in the basement. He commanded us to build our own city on a hill.

David Chilton

#56. My passion for service came from my parents, and my community involvement began at a very young age, when I volunteered with the local Chamber of Commerce in Lowell, MA to help revitalize our city.

James Costos

#57. I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.

Nathaniel Rich

#58. Little has changed in our New York neighborhoods except the faces, the names, and the languages spoken. The same decent values of hard work and accomplishment and service to city and nation still exist.

David Dinkins

#59. We know that there will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public school system for our city.

Cory Booker

#60. Our City has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District. Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most peopke find sin. - taxi driver

John Green

#61. We do ritualistic animal sacrifice. We host orgies on our trampoline, every other Sunday. You didn't get our Twitter feed on that? I'm really sorry! And then, every once in awhile, we run through the city and drain people and drink their blood. It's really very romantic.

Anna Paquin

#62. If for no other reason than the energy crisis now facing this country, the federal government should be eager to become partners with us in rebuilding our city.

Jane Byrne

#63. I will meet you in the dirtiest city you can dream of. We will drink cocktails so sweet they pucker our cheeks, as we perch on cracked leather bar stools. I will buy you plates of calcium and protein and we will run through the streets in excellent danger.

Michelle Tea

#64. And for the city's birthday, we will host events in every neighborhood of the city, inviting all of our residents to share in the celebration of Boston's great epic - the story of neighbors who support one another where it matters most.

Thomas Menino

#65. We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.

Nina LaCour

#66. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.

Richard Rogers

#67. The key to truly rebuilding our central city on a vital and sustainable foundation is people.

Alan Autry

#68. Creating a world that reflects the inner voyage of our characters was really important. Also, because this isn't a black and white show, and this isn't about bad guys and good guys, but it's about good men being capable of bad things and vice versa, I wanted to be in a city that had contradiction.

Veena Sud

#69. When you jump on a city bus or roam the streets off the major thoroughfares you'll quickly learn that we have as many differences as similarities. And therein lie the greatest opportunities for innovation - our different ways of viewing the world and coming up with solutions!

David Livermore

#70. Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square ... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do.

Eric Holder

#71. One of the greatest investments of our lifetime has been New York City real estate, and investors made the highest returns when they bought stuff during the 1970s and 1980s when people were getting mugged. The lesson is that you make the most money when you buy stuff that's out of consensus.

Mary Meeker

#72. As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Albert Camus

#73. you. Devlin and I will take our chances on the run." They rode on in silence, speeding west toward Phoenix now, a massive, distant glow on the horizon, like a city on fire.

Blake Crouch

#74. I don't know much about him. He is a carver in our bishop's city, a days journey from here; he has a great reputation as an artist. Artists usually are no saints, he's probably no saint either, but he certainly is a gifted, high-minded man.

Hermann Hesse

#75. Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God!

John Newton

#76. To sit on the front steps - whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city - and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.

Harvey Milk

#77. In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc.

Darin Strauss

#78. 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

#79. I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.

Megan Smith

#80. There's not a single day when I walk the streets of New York City when someone doesn't come up to me to say: 'Please, please, ask your dad to run for president.' We really need a businessman as leader of our country, not a politician.

Eric Trump

#81. Do you supplicate plutonium? Do you sing hymns to uranium? We bask in the corona of an insensate majesty. In its sway we seek to lay the foundation blocks of a new city, a new civilization. We're pioneers. Our frontier is the grand wasteland between Alpha and Omega.

Laird Barron

#82. God expects the ANC to rule this country because we are the only organisation which was blessed by pastors when it was formed. It is even blessed in Heaven. That is why we will rule until Jesus comes back. We should not allow anyone to govern our city [Cape Town] when we are ruling the country.

Jacob Zuma

#83. There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Jane Jacobs

#84. Conservatives need to figure out a way to motivate by reason and persuade through emotion. Meaning that when they talk about our issues, it can't come from a selfish place - "Give me a tax cut. Where's my tax cut." We have to get back to that "shining city on the hill."

Andrea Tantaros

#85. It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

Virginia Euwer Wolff

#86. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

Hamlin Garland

#87. When you see that earthly powers are not listening to you, that you are under siege in this city for four years and shot at without the international community doing anything to help, what should you do? Die?' he asked me in the course of our conversation. 'No, you pray to Heaven for help.

Kristiane Backer

#88. ...there was still the thrill of those opening credits that carried us through the harder times, that sustained our faith in a city that often didn't show much faith in us.

David Levithan

#89. We are symbolic. We are driving to the edge of the city and talking in vague-yet-resolute certainties about our dreams and our futures. We are leaving certain things in the medicine cabinet. We are falling in love.

Pete Wentz

#90. Every summer my husband and I pack our suitcases, load our kids into the car, and drive from tense, crowded New York City to my family's cottage in Maine. It's on an island, with stretches of sea and sandy beaches, rocky coasts, and pine trees. We barbecue, swim, lie around, and try to do nothing.

Hope Davis

#91. This is our fucking city. And nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.

David Ortiz, Boston Red Sox, April 21, 2013

David Ortiz

#92. Further south, there are some airports, but none our size. Our airport is the gateway to the southern Kansas City.

James Green

#93. Chills run down my spine as our fingers intwine
And your sighs harmonize with mine
Unmistakably I can still feel your heart
Beat fast when you dance with me.

Owl City

#94. We plan our lives in long, unbroken stretches that intersect our dreams the way highways connect the city dots on a road map. But in the end we learn that life is lived in the side roads, alleys, and detours. Alan Christoffersen's diary

Richard Paul Evans

#95. We must be willing to courageously invest in our city.

Alan Autry

#96. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city

Haruki Murakami

#97. This City is what it is because our citizens are what they are.

Plato

#98. Football has very direct and strong connections to New Orleans. The game of football has served as a positive beacon in our city. It has given our citizens hope in tough, trying times.

Tom Benson

#99. What we need to do in the community, and in the city, and in the state. We need to stop airing our differences in front of the white man. Put the white man out of our meetings, number one, and then sit down and talk shop with each other. [That's] all you gotta do.

Malcolm X

#100. One of the things that we talked about was this idea of 'Memento Mori' - like the reminder of our own mortality - and so we were sort of trying to express that in our press photos. And it's one of the themes of the album [Modern Vampires of the City] as well.

Rostam Batmanglij