Top 95 Urban City Quotes
#1. If you're in an urban city like New York, the corner markets are fantastic sources for tulips and roses.
Clinton Smith
#2. I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.
Richard Price
#3. The man slips along the stoically congealed houses
Perpendicular
like them
A moving ornament
Burning fiction
His fragility contradicts the duration of his torments
Helene Baronne D'Oettingen
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. San Francisco lags behind other communities in providing a vital, vibrant and ecologically sustainable urban canopy, as well as open space in the city.
Gavin Newsom
#7. You can't find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it's rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions - but I'm ten minutes from the centre of the city.
Moby
#8. 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
#9. For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.
Isa Kamari
#10. It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters.
Charles Emmerson
#11. It's a strange city ... filled with things that are not obvious.
A.M. Homes
#12. Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian.
Carlo Ratti
#13. I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.
Jeanette Winterson
#14. The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#15. The 1890s was a decade when life began to change in urban America. Modern conveniences that we now take for granted came into use; women's roles became less restrictive; and San Francisco, a port city with influences from all over the world, was a lively place in which to reside.
Marcia Muller
#16. The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.
Michael Montoure
#17. I grew up in the city. Both my mother and father were factory workers, and I loved the life in the 'metro.' Everybody saw me as a very urban guy. And I was.
Per Petterson
#18. A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.
Leon Krier
#19. There were a few nighttime pedestrians on the block, but they continued on their way, dutifully ignoring the zombie vomiting blood out of the back of my car. Good old New Yorkers. They really couldn't care less.
Nicholas Kaufmann
#20. Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?
Tom McDonough
#21. Get off that damn chair and pull yourself together. You're supposed to be an ageless creature of chaos and all I'm getting right now is sulking city boy.
Pippa DaCosta
#22. A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.
Nelson Algren
#24. Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.
Sheridan Hay
#25. The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences.
Nelson Algren
#26. Richard Pryor introduced me to the world of the inner city, and the urban world, and did it hysterically. My favorite comedian, even though we work 180 degrees differently, but funny is funny is funny.
Bob Newhart
#27. I think ultimately, bringing more nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl and things like that. If the cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there more rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn't be touched.
Stone Gossard
#28. But you're out of another world old kid ... You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.
John Dos Passos
#29. We're creating these massive urban areas in the Third World. It's like you take the entire population of California and put it in one city. Then you remove basic sanitation and medical services, and you have a ticking biological time bomb.
Richard Preston
#30. So he [Sigmund Freud] called this "the uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk.
DJ Spooky
#31. Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city's flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.
Charlie LeDuff
#32. The youth were to be trained to be the vanguard of the next battlefront, whatever that was. I knew within my heart that the Gibson experiment in city hall would attract enemies, so I intended to teach these young people how to fight on this new battlefield.
Junius Williams
#33. Frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.
Jane Jacobs
#34. This is the contradictory desire in our utopia. We want to live in a small community with which we can identify and yet we want all the facilities of the city of millions of people. We want to have very intense urban experiences and yet we want the open space right next to us.
Moshe Safdie
#35. You can't understand a city without using its public transportation system.
Erol Ozan
#36. The merchant increases the speed of the city. The musician slows it down. The merchant intensifies the urban stress, the noise, the chaos. The musician makes you slow down, find your center. This holds true in all cities and countries.
Nicos Hadjicostis
#37. 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
#38. Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
Jane Jacobs
#39. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
Bill Bryson
#40. Detroit is an urban hell. But even in this city of the dying auto industry, there is reason to hope, if they manage to combine the creative forces of designers and other intellectual "suppliers" in other ways.
Charles Landry
#41. Let's do it right. This is for the ages.
I.M. Pei
#42. A border
the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory
forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.
Jane Jacobs
#43. An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it's where even the rich use public transportation
Enrique Penalosa
#44. A city is simply a passel of people packed in a pot like pickles.
David Detzer
#45. Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days' time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves.
Isa Kamari
#46. And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there ... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
#47. 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
#48. Great artists need great clients.
I.M. Pei
#49. From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life.
Bao Shu
#50. the presence of buildings around a park is important in design. They enclose it. They make a definite shape out of the space, so that it appears as an important event in the city scene, a positive feature, rather than a no-account leftover.
Jane Jacobs
#51. A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.
S.J Perelman
#52. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
Jared Diamond
#53. By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.
Socrates
#54. Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
Jonathan Kozol
#55. There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.
Juan Enriquez
#56. Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Teju Cole
#57. Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.
David Goodis
#58. Because I'm seen on 'Oz', a lot of the urban cats in the city are like, 'Yo, I thought you'd be rolling in a Mercedes?' And I'm just like, 'Not at all!' This is cable money. There is a big difference between that and a network. But still I can't complain. It's better than doing a 9 to 5 any day.
Kirk Acevedo
#59. I don't know if it matters what country you're from, size of the city you're from, urban or rural, there are people that are hurting each other everywhere.
Judd Nelson
#60. To the extent that the (ISIS's) advance is a series of urban revolts against the government of PM Nouri al-Maliki, the US would end up bombing ordinary city folk. For the US to be bombing Sunni towns all these years later on behalf of Mr. al-Maliki would be to invite terrorism against the US.
Juan Cole
#61. So on June 16, 1970, history was made in Newark. Ken Gibson became the first black mayor of a major Northeastern city.
Junius Williams
#62. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#63. New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.
Charles Emmerson
#64. The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.
Charles E. Rosenberg
#65. Many of the world's best-designed cities have been inspired by garden concepts.
Tom Turner
#66. I know that New York City remains the highest density urban area in the country and by far dedicates more of its own funds to fighting terrorism than any other municipality.
Jose Serrano
#67. Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude; they are not unfriendly; they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.
Phyllis McGinley
#68. These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.
Elizabeth Winder
#69. The disadvantages of a decentralized, spread out urban area are tremendous, and the environmental damage of urban sprawl cannot be ignored. As a large city, Tokyo must be used more efficiently and the population density increased.
Minoru Mori
#70. The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
Lewis Mumford
#71. In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Jane Smiley
#72. Smart habitation is an integrated area of villages and a city working in harmony and where the rural and urban divide has reduced to thin line.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#73. The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child's life.
Betty Smith
#74. ... where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.
China Mieville
#75. A young, beautiful mayor's with high-powered plans for the city of Compton must put them aside to become a sleuth to solve the assassination of her husband, the mayor.
Martha Tucker
#76. There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.
Jane Jacobs
#77. People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city.
Andy Goldsworthy
#78. We all tend to think of ourselves as the last unsinning inhabitants of whatever place we live in. We don't usually recognize ourselves as participants in its destruction.
David Owen
#79. The first time I've actually filmed in London, the locations we've all had have been real inner city, grimy urban places which has been great. Filming here, you've got everything on your doorstep, so when you've got time off, you can go into town, so I've really enjoyed it.
Jonas Armstrong
#80. The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.
Anna Quindlen
#81. ... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Carlos Fuentes
#82. Poverty in a big city is more humiliating and deadening to all the joys of life than it can possibly be elsewhere.
Albert Bigelow Paine
#83. The first sight of the Rapstone Valley is of something unexpectedly isolated and uninterruptedly rural; a solitary jogger is the only outward sign of urban pollution.
John Mortimer
#84. We were talking about urban youth. And by urban I mean lives in a city not urban as in black like white people use it.
Hannibal Buress
#86. The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes.
Douglas Adams
#87. You're telling me a shape-shifting demon just walked out onto Fifth Avenue and blended in with the crowd?" I asked. "Hailed a fucking cab after tearing everyone to pieces down here?
Nicholas Kaufmann
#88. If we stand passively by while the centre of each city becomes a hive of depravation, crime and hopelessness ... if we become two people, the suburban affluent and the urban poor, each filled with mistrust and fear for the other ... then we shall effectively cripple each generation to come.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#89. It was common knowledge that big, bad city boys spent the bulk of their time sleeping around, coiffing their hair and posting pictures of food on the internet.
Gena Showalter
#90. I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.
Sheridan Hay
#91. I didn't tell him that I grew up in an ugly city that taught me how to look between dust and rubbish and potholes to find a splinter of glass that looked like unmelting ice, beautiful in its defiance of the sun.
Kamila Shamsie
#92. I mean, electric shock? Isn't that a bit ... electric shock-y?
Emmett Spain
#93. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
David Harvey
#94. As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
Jane Jacobs
