Top 100 Quotes About Big Cities
#1. It is a fact of big cities that one girl's darkest how is always another's moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.
Anna Godbersen
#2. Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.
Toyo Ito
#3. He is defining the immediate future as follows: old people huddling in big cities, afraid of the sky.
Warren Ellis
#4. I think the most important manner is just general kindness. When you go to big cities, sometimes people forget to just say, "Good morning," or "How are you?"
Jaime King
#5. I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.
Iain Banks
#6. A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
Edward Abbey
#7. In small towns, bored teenagers turn their eyes longingly to the exciting doings in the big cities, pining for urban amenities like hipster bars and farmers' markets and indie-rock festivals. Like everyone else, they want the vibrant and they will not be denied.
Thomas Frank
#8. The news of the open military help to Franco from Hitler and Mussolini, and the heroic resistance of the people of Madrid, Barcelona and the big cities fired a widespread wish to help the Republic and its people.
Bill Alexander
#9. The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.
Meghan Daum
#10. Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.
Frank Norris
#11. We've achieved this feeling, for instance, with the colors. The colors in the park are harmonious with each other, not like in big cities where they don't.
John Hench
#12. Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.
Jane Jacobs
#13. At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.
James A. Michener
#14. People are people, and I get a bit annoyed that the music business only focuses in on the big metropolises. I find that people that don't live in big cities are just as likely to enjoy music as people that do live in big cities.
Eddi Reader
#15. Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.
Susan Orlean
#16. I haven't travelled that much before so this is the first time I get to see the big cities of Europe. I've never even been to US.
Ville Valo
#17. I think when you get out of the big cities people get really freaked out when they see someone who is on TV, because they're not used to that.
Bryan Greenberg
#18. The fact is that automobiles no longer have a place in the big cities of our time.
Bertrand Delanoe
#19. Gun-related violence and murders are concentrated among blacks and Latinos in big cities.
Juan Williams
#20. I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.
John Lee Hooker
#22. As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi.
Pankaj Mishra
#23. That's the great thing about big cities: Nobody is judging. You really get a chance to show who you are with your style.
Chris Paul
#24. He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities
Karan Mahajan
#26. His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
Steven Johnson
#27. Nat thought to himself that "they" were no doubt considering the problem at that very moment, but whatever "they" decided to do in London and the big cities would not help the people here, three hundred miles away. Each householder must look after his own.
Daphne Du Maurier
#28. Big cities squeeze the ability to be patient right out of people. Life becomes too frantic and rushed. It's a sad thing.
Deb Baker
#29. It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.
Tony Abbott
#30. Science will liberate us from the chains of big cities and lead us back to nature.
Lennart Meri
#31. Watch out for dark streets in big cities because there are a lot of strange beings that hang out there at night, let alone the people. Don't you remember anything from your other lives?
Frederick Lenz
#32. For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.
Pankaj Mishra
#33. I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.
Lee Smith
#35. I used to walk in the Bowery in the early 1980s, and it was not safe. It went from this to Disneyland under Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is now one of the best-run big cities in the world.
Mark Rutte
#37. There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow.
Woody Allen
#38. Today the average age of first marriage is about twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men, and it's around thirty for both men and women in big cities like New York and Philadelphia.
Aziz Ansari
#39. The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#40. I bet in big cities you can walk down the street scrowling and no one will ask you what's wrong or encourage you to smile, but everyone here has the attitude that we're lucky to live in Hawaii; paradise reigns supreme. I think paradise can go fuck itself.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#41. Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.
Richard Peck
#42. 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
#43. Most big cities like London and Glasgow have great big rivers that are unmissable. What's brilliant about the Water of Leith is that it's so hidden. It's a secret.
Antony Gormley
#44. The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life
Joseph Rykwert
#45. The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.
Nora Ephron
#46. Standup keeps me grounded and keeps me in touch. I get to go from small towns to big cities, across Canada and the U.S., and you're out there and talking to people. You get a sense of what they respond to.
Howie Mandel
#47. A number of studies of homeless youth in big cities put forth a startling statistic: Depending on the study, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of homeless youths identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Margot Adler
#48. I'm a country girl. The more big cities I go to, the more fashionistas and designers I meet who want to dress me, the more I have all these kind of superficial but amazing experiences, the more I just realize that I'm from Gloucestershire.
FKA Twigs
#49. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#50. Sewage works that serve big cities run into trouble when the cities grow up around them.
Rose George
#51. My audience is, you know, pinkos in big cities.
Steve Earle
#52. The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.
Phillip Lopate
#53. Most of the books that feature supernatural characters blending with the modern world and are usually set in big cities.
Charlaine Harris
#54. In all big cities the style of life is the same. Same endless array of restaurants; same big museums with the usual suspects; same anonymity, which can be thrilling when you're young but which I found got tiresome.
Yann Martel
#55. It's fair to say that Jews dominated basketball and that started in the 30s in all the big cities. I think it was simply because Jews lived in ghettoes and basketball is a great schoolyard game. You don't need a lot of space or equipment and you can adapt it to how many players you have.
Dolph Schayes
#56. I perform in opera houses in the centres of big cities. We live in 20 acres of forest. You need that space to recover and renew.
Sondra Radvanovsky
#57. Big cities have a lot of 'younger brothers' who have left traditional parts of the world and their families for a more liberal lifestyle. But cities are filled to the gills with 'elder brothers' too.
Timothy Keller
#58. People in my village had this mindset that in big cities like New York, if you are lost or without directions, no one will help you. The first time I came here, I tried to make sure not to walk by myself, because it would be difficult for me if I got lost. But people will help you.
William Kamkwamba
#59. When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.
Maya Angelou
#60. Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.
Kate Grenville
#61. I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.
Salman Rushdie
#62. Well, I'm kind of an urban girl, I like big cities. I like New York, I like London, I like L.A. I like people, I get lonely, really, really easily. But, I think it was good, It was very different and I think that's good.
AnnaSophia Robb
#63. Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.
Emma Jane Unsworth
#64. Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.
John Hench
#65. Its all big money, high rent, high prices in New York City now. The poor people completely got rolled over. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's disgusting.
Ralph Bakshi
#66. I'm not a big city guy ... there's too many people, there's too much traffic.
Jeremy Bonderman
#67. Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills - the pension bills they cannot afford - come due. They'll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.
John Podhoretz
#68. It is the custom to sneer at the modern apartment-house, television, big-city Christmas, with its commercial taint ... office parties, artificial ... Christmas trees ... but future generations in search of their lost Christmases may well remember its innocence; yes, and its beauty, too.
Paul Gallico
#69. There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago. Cities are too big and too rich for beauty; they have outgrown themselves too many times.
Noel Perrin
#70. I saw what I could [in Mexico City], but we rarely got anything other than big, mainstream American films.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#71. I don't think we yet know - because it's probably not big enough - what exactly Amazon does to our cities, but whatever it is, I don't anticipate retail wastelands. If anything, it's maybe a wake-up call to retailers that they just have to offer something meaningful to customers.
Brad Stone
#72. If you have 'too big to fail' for cities or for states, and they believe they'll be bailed out, they'll continue to make unwise decisions.
Rand Paul
#73. L.A.'s large convenience stores are so big they can accommodate up to twenty armed robbers at one time.
Jay Leno
#74. I love Chicago. It was an awesome place to grow up. It's a big city but it doesn't feel like one. I can't imagine that if I had kids I would raise them anywhere else besides Chicago.
Chris McCaughan
#75. It's great for me to hear those different reactions because when I travel with a movie like this [World of Tommorow], it's very similar. You'll hear a line in one city get a big laugh, and then in another city, the same line kind of gets a gasp, and that's wonderful.
Don Hertzfeldt
#76. There is no tougher job in America than being a cop on the beat in a major city in this country, big and brawling.
Mark Shields
#77. We are New Yorkers. Proud citizens of the greatest city on earth. Thinking big isn't new to us. It is the very foundation of who we are.
Bill De Blasio
#78. The loneliest place to be is a hotel room in a big city in early evening.
Willa Gibbs
#79. I love that Toronto is demonstrating that a big, highly diverse, multicultural city can actually work and work well, if its residents have the attitude of Torontonians.
Roger Martin
#80. When you get down to the nitty gritty, isn't it a pity that in this big city not one little bitty man will admit that he could have been a little wrong.
Elvis Presley
#81. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#82. Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century.
Paul Goldberger
#83. Dubai,I think is a big bore - a city deliberately built to appeal to tourism, and only built for that purpose, and not possessing a valid culture or history of its own.
Arthur Frommer
#84. Both 'The Wire' and 'Queer as Folk' had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time.
Aidan Gillen
#85. I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston.
Anne Rivers Siddons
#86. It's paradoxical that where people are most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities of the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest ... The explanation is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It's psychic distance.
Robert M. Pirsig
#87. Old Hank would be proud, and Elvis would too, cause we like our country mixed with some big city blues.
Hank Williams Jr.
#88. I loved doing Cee Lo's Bright Lights in the Big City. That was definitely a favorite of mine, because I love to get all soulful. And a close second would be Flo Rida's Right Round, because I could rap, which I've never really done before.
Skylar Astin
#89. In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.
Bjarke Ingels
#90. The third big war will begin when the big city is burning
Nostradamus
#91. Confused by the big city blues, he didn't know who's life he's leading. Put yourself behind the wheel, see if you can get that feel.
Robbie Robertson
#92. I'm not anti-Muslim, I'm not anti-immigration; I'm saying we've got big problems in our cities. It's not very smart to make the problem bigger by letting in millions more immigrants from rural Muslim cultures that don't assimilate.
Pim Fortuyn
#93. Sometimes we're the big game in town. Other times, we're kind of a side show.
(on Manchester City)
Claudio Reyna
#94. Whenever I'm out of town for at least a week, I feel like I should write a postcard or something, but you can be a genius, you try and write a postcard you come across like a moron anyway: 'This city's got big buildings. I like food. Bye.'
Jim Gaffigan
#95. 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
#96. I live in Sydney now. I came here for the show and never went home - I do like it, it's a big change ... it's a big city, it's very fast.
Kate DeAraugo
#97. What we see out there is an affordable housing crisis, particularly in the rental market in cities big and small, and we don't have the resources necessary to fill that gap.
Julian Castro
#98. We're crazy about this city. Los Angeles? That's just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.
John Lennon
#99. I come from a very small rural village in northern Germany, and being an actor never even seemed like a possibility. I thought you would have to live in a big city, or be discovered somewhere, or be born into an artistic family, which I certainly wasn't.
Diane Kruger
#100. It was difficult for me to understand that, when you're kind to someone in a big city, a lot of the time, they think that you want something. I didn't understand that, all of a sudden, niceness meant that you were trying to get something out of somebody.
Jaime King
