Quotes About The City Of London

#1. The motto of the old order in the City of London was, 'My word is my bond,' but the financial crisis revealed a culture quite alien to that heritage. The stewards of people's money were revealed to have been speculators with it.

Gordon Brown

#2. No foteball player be used or suffered within the City of London and the liberties thereof upon pain of imprisonment.

Elizabeth I

#3. I don't think there is a sound UK bank now, at least, if there is one I don't know about it. The City of London is finished, the financial centre of the world is moving east. All the money is in Asia. Why would it go back to the West? You don't need London.

Jim Rogers

#4. The fact is, we're looking for a very small number of very evil needles in a very large haystack, which is the city of London.

Charles Clarke

#5. We'd learned in school that the city of London, England, is the largest city in the whole wide world. Maybe so. But it couldn't have been much bigger than Rutland.

Robert Newton Peck

#6. The real power is not corporate; it is private. They choose not to have a name. It is a dynasty of banking families - Rothschild and Rockefeller being two - that operate chiefly out of London, in the boardrooms out of the city of London and the Bank of England, which they own.

Betty Dodson

#7. You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

Archibald MacLeish

#8. The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis.

Henry Mayhew

#9. I do hate the City of London! It is the only thing which ever comes between us.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#10. There's nobody on a normal income who can afford to live anywhere centrally, so everything becomes displaced and decentralized. The city [of London] becomes incongruent. It doesn't have any coherence anymore.

Alasdair MacLean

#11. I don't believe a Brexit will hurt the City of London as one of the largest financial centers in the world.

Yanis Varoufakis

#12. There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear - the city of London and the South Seas.

Herman Melville

#13. The dog is in Portugal and the city of London is safe.

Jose Mourinho

#14. Provided that the City of London remains, as it is at present, the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop.

Joseph Chamberlain

#15. There is no conflict between best in British class and being a global newspaper. We are an international newspaper rooted in the City of London, and I think people understand that. The 'FT' stands out as a global niche product.

Lionel Barber

#16. The City of London has never been known for understanding technology and has never matched Silicon Valley's tradition of knowledgeable investment in technology start-ups, just as the U.K. government has never matched the vast investment made by the U.S. government.

Geoff Mulgan

#17. It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Philip Reeve

#18. On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.

Bertolt Brecht

#19. New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

Thomas Jefferson

#20. England is my home. London is my home. New York feels like, if I have to spend a year living in an unfamiliar city, this is a pretty lovely one to spend a year in, but I will be going home at the end of it, certainly.

Daniel Radcliffe

#21. Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

David Mitchell

#22. I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.

Tracey Emin

#23. The cold is waiting to ooze through the soles of your shoes. Maggot-damp, this city is festering: home to hollow faces of grey flesh. They stare from windows unclean, into the sun never reaches: dismal lives lived in dismal constriction.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#24. Let me wake up next to you, have coffee in the morning and wander through the city with your hand in mine, and I'll be happy for the rest of my fucked up little life.

Charlotte Eriksson

#25. It is very difficult to say nowadays where the suburbs of London come to an end and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country have turned the countryside into a city.

Anthony Trollope

#26. I spend a lot of time in L.A., and I think it would probably be easier if I lived there work wise, but there's no city like London, there is so much going on. I can jump on the Tube and be anywhere in 20 minutes, and all my friends and family are here and I'm not prepared to give that up.

Jeremy Irvine

#27. This was London, after all. I had read somewhere that wherever you stand in the entire city, you're never more than twenty yards from a rat. There were 50 million of them. That was like seven rats per human.

Amanda Gefter

#28. If you take the contempt some Americans have for yuppies and multiply it by 10 you might come close to understanding their attitude towards the City, as they call it - London, the people of the south.

Martin Cruz Smith

#29. The houses [my first project in London] were reactions to the condition of the city and my frustrations with the norms that were being played out. In a way they were slightly subconscious but reactions to that condition and a way to posit new possibilities within certain pervasive norms.

David Adjaye

#30. Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#31. I've always said that L.A. is the city of America's future. It is to the world what London was in the 19th century and New York in the 20th because of the growth of the Pacific Rim countries. We're the portal to the emerging world.

Antonio Villaraigosa

#32. London has a quarter of the whole world's supply of closed circuit cameras, all in one city.

Lee Child

#33. He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city, a process that accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile.

Aldous Huxley

#34. Americans are immensely popular in Paris; and this is not due solely to the fact that they spend lots of money there, for they spend just as much or more in London, and in the latter city they are merely tolerated because they do spend.

James Weldon Johnson

#35. From the point of view of the criminal expert," said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, "London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#36. I can't get enough of London! I love all the picnic benches, the old-school phone booths and parks in the middle of the city.

Jessica Lowndes

#37. Aberdeen, a city in the northern reaches of HSBC-London. Their

Gary Shteyngart

#38. Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

John Berger

#39. I think London, New York, Paris, Milan, any big city has its own fashion. I don't know why they make such a big thing of Paris. I think maybe it comes from French New Wave films portraying the French girl as very feminine.

Josephine De La Baume

#40. They have little in common, save for their geography, and the fact that each has a version of this city straddling this river on this island country, and in each, that city is called London.

Victoria Schwab

#41. Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.

Kenneth Tynan

#42. The sixteen hundred dairies in California's Central Valley alone produce more waste than a city of twenty-one million people-that's more than the populations of London, New York, and Chicago combined.

Gene Baur

#43. London is the most commercially important city in Europe, and it's the most populous city. It should be for the whole of the European continent what New York is to America. That's what it should be.

Boris Johnson

#44. Behold now this vast city [London]; a city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with His protection.

John Milton

#45. This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.

Carrie Vaughn

#46. If I were a place, the area of South Bank, in London. Between the Hayward Gallery, National Theatre and all other activities, I'm never bored. I would also say New York for the breathtaking skyline formed by the buildings and the fast pace of the city, whatever the time of day.

Robert Pattinson

#47. In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

Mark Twain

#48. [London is] one of the best cities in the world. There is just so much culture there and so much history and so much diversity. It's just a perfect place to grow up. I studied at the Guildhall every Saturday so I'd always be in town every weekend doing that. I was kind of a city boy really.

Douglas Booth

#49. 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

#50. Without the queen pulling your strings, you're nothing but thoughts and dreams. Such things are easily destroyed." ~ General Kael, City of Fae #2

Pippa DaCosta

#51. It is not the walls that make the city, but the people who live within them. The walls of London may be battered, but the spirit of the Londoner stands resolute and undismayed.

George VI

#52. London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

Henry James

#53. My London constituency in Hackney has one of the highest levels of gun crime in the country. But the problem is no longer confined to inner city areas. Gun crime has spread to communities all over Britain.

Diane Abbott

#54. London is a good fashion city. They're a little more daring. There's the element of the aristocracy, which is always interesting.

John Legend

#55. London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best places to have a good day

Mhairi McFarlane

#56. Do you think now and then, now or then, in the whirl
Of the city, while London is new,
Of the hut in the Bush, and the freckled-faced girl
Who is eating her heart out for you?

Henry Lawson

#57. As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there's no point complaining that it's a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit and the name of that limit is 'taking the piss'.

Ben Aaronovitch

#58. I've been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I'm privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again.

Jeffrey Archer

#59. I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.

Ben Schott

#60. A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.

China Mieville

#61. The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.

Anna Quindlen

#62. When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

Norman Foster

#63. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.

Alasdair Gray

#64. More passengers fly in and out of London than any other city in the world. We are well-connected, we have ample capacity, and we are starting from a position of strength. The problem is that we don't use that capacity well.

Zac Goldsmith

#65. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Anna Quindlen

#66. I'm ashamed to say that getting behind the wheel of Dirk's shiny Penismobile was actually a lot of fun.

Emmett Spain

#67. London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.

John Lanchester

#68. London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.

Alan Moore

#69. If London is the Emerald City, then Los Angeles is what exists at the other end of the yellow brick road.

Monika Chiang

#70. One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.

Julia Gregson

#71. The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city ...

Charles Finch

#72. One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

Danny Boyle

#73. And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid - the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city's alchemists whine like dogs - was provoking more and more interest from London's repo-men and -women.

China Mieville

#74. Your own exploration therefore has to be personalized; you're doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.

Geoff Nicholson

#75. To suggest social action for the public good to the city London is like discussing The Origin of Species to a Bishop sixty years ago.

John Maynard Keynes

#76. Britain's decision to send troops to the city did more to change the thinking of Bostonians than any step previously taken by London.

John Ferling

#77. Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Orson Welles

#78. Paris certainly needs to promote itself. Although still the most visited city in the world, it has fallen behind London and Berlin in terms of cool.

Janine Di Giovanni

#79. If Rome, a city of the vulgar living, had been depressing after Greece, London, a city of the drab dead, was fifty times worse.

John Fowles

#80. It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

Anna Quindlen

#81. We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop 's tongs - we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

Peter Porter

#82. He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough

Will Self

#83. I love New York City. The energy, the theatre, the art, the food, the people, the parks and streets. But I could say the same of London or Paris, too.

Pierce Brosnan

#84. We shall defend every village, every town and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.

Winston Churchill

#85. I don't like the idea that one hotel could be better than another. In any city, I try to find a hotel that has the identity of that place - Claridge's in London, the Danieli or Cipriani in Venice. In New York, I stay at the Mercer Hotel; it is so much in the character of SoHo.

Jean Nouvel

#86. Adaora was beginning to see why Ayodele's people had chosen the city of Lagos. If they'd landed in New York, Tokyo or London, the governments of these places would have quickly swooped to hide, isolate and study the aliens. Here in Lagos, there was no such order.

Nnedi Okorafor

#87. She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#88. In England I am always madam; I arrived too late to ever be a miss. In New York I have only been madamed once, by the doorman at the Carlyle Hotel.

Anna Quindlen

#89. Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?'
'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.'
'The city still has working phone booths?'
'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

Kate Morton

#90. New York City has fantastic restaurants and, unlike London, a lot of the best restaurants are relatively cheap.

Tibor Fischer

#91. In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.

Simon McBurney

#92. East Side, West Side, all around the town,
The tots sang Ring-a-rosie, London Bridge is falling Down;
Boys and Girls together, me and Mamie O'Rorke,
Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

James W. Blake

#93. When Kirsten carried out a portable defibrillator the size of a breadbox, I very nearly went into cardiac arrest. Which, let's face it, would probably fall under the category of 'most ironic thing ever'.

Emmett Spain

#94. Whenever I come back to London, which is home, I get that cosy, comfortable feeling of being home, as well as the sophistication of this city.

Tom Hiddleston

#95. Arrau performed complete cycles of the Beethoven Sonatas, first in Mexico City in 1938 and later in Buenos Aires, London, and New York.

Victoria A Von Arx

#96. Cities depend on a healthy mix of uses and people for their vitality. As a pre-eminent world city, London is a magnet to people from across the globe.

Richard Rogers

#97. London is one of the most fascinating, historic, amazing cities in the world!

Sophie Kinsella

#98. From the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people and already a much bigger world.

Julia Gregson

#99. I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It's freezing and it starts to rain and it's the ugliest bus I've ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds.

David Thewlis

#100. In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.

Peter Capaldi