Quotes About Old Cities

#1. Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls

Robert Walser

#2. Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

Rem Koolhaas

#3. There are cities that have no ... I don't know what to call it, an identity perhaps. A sense of being someplace different. Lots of those in the Empire. Very old cities with lots of history, but one day is much like the next.

Raymond E. Feist

#4. I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.

Donald Barthelme

#5. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do - they never adapt either.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#6. 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

#7. Many, many large cities have old, crumbling infrastructure that have got to be dealt with in the nearest future, or they're going to be in serious trouble. They'll be unlivable if they don't do something.

Andrew Natsios

#8. I know the city and the club, and I can tell you that when you play for Manchester United at Old Trafford, you no longer need to see the sunshine every day.

Patrice Evra

#9. We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.

Stephen Jay Gould

#10. It's one thing for a courier service transport letters and documents from one city to another at a cost that only big business can afford; but it's another thing to take a letter from an Indian boy studying at the University of Ottawa to his mother in Old Crow.

Jean Chretien

#11. I don't want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat, and lies ...
In the Hills, the Cities

Clive Barker

#12. There's no platform for an unsigned music scene in the main cities - it's all hyped acts or showcases behind closed doors. I read about artists that are doing it 'the old-fashioned way' and touring, as if that's a unique thing to do - well, that should just be the way it is.

Ben Lovett

#13. Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.

Harold Urey

#14. What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world's great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.

Tom Reiss

#15. Some cities are like joyful little children, they live for their summers, and other cities have personalities more like curmudgeonly old men who live for their winters, simply because it means they may wear big coats with lots of pockets to put their things in.

Benjamin Hale

#16. When I am gone, I do not want men to say Look at his piles of wealth, his cities, his palaces and fine clothes." Genghis paused for a moment. "Instead I want them to say Make sure he is truly dead. He is a vicious old man and he conquered half the world.

Conn Iggulden

#17. The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

H.G.Wells

#18. I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.

Geraldine Brooks

#19. Violence has to end. And Israelis have a bright to defend themselves against any violence that is attacking innocent people with a knife in the old city in Jerusalem or elsewhere. No country should be under siege like that.

John F. Kerry

#20. The bus stops and out get the sort of people who travel by bus between cities: students, old people--mainly women--and the middle-aged who cannot afford the train and who have never grown old enough to drive. Out we get, and away we go, the young, the old, and the failed girls.

Joanna Walsh

#21. For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

Annie Dillard

#22. I've seen my own films close to a thousand times in one form or another. When you edit them. When you shoot them. Then you run them over and over again for sound and music. Then you'd go to premiere screenings, and have to do promotional screenings in other cities. I can't watch any of my old films.

William Friedkin

#23. She didn't watch the dead, ancient bone-chess cities slide under, or the old canals filled with emptiness and dreams. Past dry rivers and dry lakes they flew, like a shadow of the moon, like a torch burning.

Ray Bradbury

#24. When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

Robert Ludlum

#25. Old New York City is a friendly old town From Washington Heights to Harlem on down There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down It's hard times in the city Livin' down in New York town

Bob Dylan

#26. Moving cities are a fairly hoary old sci-fi trope - I seem to recall they were always cropping up on 'Doctor Who' when I was young, though I may be misremembering.

Philip Reeve

#27. We were very pleased to have the opportunity to come to Israel and visit the holy sites in the Old City.

Ozzy Osbourne

#28. There hasn't been a lot written about it in the Western media. But in the Arab world, and Western Asia as a whole, Baghdad was always known as a famously bookish, intellectual city. There's an old saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads.

Annia Ciezadlo

#29. I'm a collector of cartoons. All the Disney stuff, Bugs Bunny, the old MGM ones. It's real escapism, it's like everything's alright. It's like the world is happening now in a far away city. Everything's fine.

Michael Jackson

#30. Their language was an old wild language. They had known incredible loves and dark adventures and the twisted streets of alien cities. They had known the green breaking waves of the sea, and the green aisles of the silent forests. They had known war and death and fierce, cruel elation.

Winifred Holtby

#31. It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.

Michael Herr

#32. I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city ... It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.

Katherine Mansfield

#33. He is defining the immediate future as follows: old people huddling in big cities, afraid of the sky.

Warren Ellis

#34. In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as "either France or Sweden" and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger.

Dave Barry

#35. 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

#36. Stress is the demon in our society, stalking the cities and the countryside, striking down young and old and growing in strength daily.

Srikumar Rao

#37. We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

Jacque Fresco

#38. [On Los Angeles:] This city is a hundred years old but try and find some trace of its history. Every culture is swallowed up and spat out as a franchise. Taco Bell. Benihana of Tokyo. Numero Uno Pizza. Pup 'N' Taco. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fast food sushi. Teriyaki Bowl.

Anne Finger

#39. When cities were first founded, an old Egyptian scribe tells us, the mission of the founder was to 'put gods in their shrines.' The task of the coming city is not essentially different: its mission is to put the highest concerns of man at the center of all his activities.

Lewis Mumford

#40. Old Hank would be proud, and Elvis would too, cause we like our country mixed with some big city blues.

Hank Williams Jr.

#41. If you grow up in the suburbs, you hear of people dying of old age, car wrecks, cancer. In the city, it's always people dying of violence or stray bullets.

Suge Knight

#42. But let us not forget that cities are like human beings. They are born, they go through childhood and adolescence, they grow old, and eventually they die

Elif Shafak

#43. Justin is twenty-four years old: the world will never be more suited to him than it is now, he will never feel more embraced by life or have greater faith in his right to exist. The earth and the oxygen, the cities and lights, the nights and the beaches seem created for him and for those like him.

Sonya Hartnett

#44. The old Catholic parties hounded me with a Christian hatred from station to station, city to city, one stage to another.

Josephine Baker

#45. I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.

Orhan Pamuk

#46. In the City of Death, there is pitch darkness and huge clouds of dust, neither sister nor brother is there. This body is frail, old age is overtaking it.

Guru Gobind Singh

#47. I'm old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

P. J. O'Rourke

#48. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart ... To go alone ... into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth
it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.

Thomas Wolfe

#49. As a 13-year-old fan of horror fiction, I hadn't seen too many cities in the literature I loved. It was always small towns, or backwoods locales, or maybe the suburbs.

Victor LaValle

#50. The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions of use and ornament. We want, therefore, a city planning profession ...

Horace Bushnell

#51. Us comics guys tend to get really good at the things we draw a lot. I'm good at creepy old forests, Victorian houses, underground goblin cities, and beautiful but creepy fairies.

Ted Naifeh

#52. They trapped the Lion on Shamu's plain; They weighted his limbs with an iron chain; They cried aloud in the trumpet-blast, They cried, "The lion is caged at last!" Woe to the Cities of river and plain If ever the Lion stalks again! - Old Ballad.

Robert E. Howard

#53. After World War II, a lot of people moved to the cities for work and abandoned the old vineyards. Then in the 1950s and 1960s, wineries were paid to produce volume at a cheap price. That's when the Lambruscos and bad Chianti were popular.

Joe Bastianich

#54. The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

Timothy Egan

#55. What's the difference in opening from scratch in Philly or opening from scratch in New York? The old out-of-town tryout circuit - taking the show pre-Broadway to cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington - has sort of been replaced with the amount of workshops we do.

Patti LuPone

#56. Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime, A rose-red city'half as old asTime'!

John Burgon