The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. Desmond Morris
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight. John Milton, Paradise Lost 9:445
To one who has been long in city pent,
’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven. John Keats, 1817
The modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else. Frank Lloyd Wright
For a city to grow it needs two ingredients: good transport and clean sanitation. Ronald Top, More Industrial Revelations s4e3: Europe – The City, Discovery 2006
But once we really run out of the basic resources we need to sustain human life those cities become ghost towns. Professor Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University
A big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Raymond Chandler, re Los Angeles
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. Raymond Chandler
The stings,
The crowd, and buzz, and murmurings
Of this great hive, the city. Abraham Cowley, 1618-67
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. T S Eliot, The Waste Land
City of perspiring dreams. Frederic Raphael, The Glittering Prizes, re Cambridge, 1976
Cities produce their own micro-climates. Professors Iain Stewart & Kathy Sykes, Future Earth
What is the city but the people? William Shakespeare, Coriolanus III I 198
Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere. ibid. III iii 131
There’s many a beast then in a populous city,
And many a civil monster. William Shakespeare, Othello IV I 61-62, Iago
The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night. James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night
All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris. Peter Ackroyd
Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be. Aravind Adiga
The sun. Life … High in the heavens. Far away from them. Metropolis 1927 starring Brigitte Helm & Gustav Frohlich & Alfred Abel & Rudolph Klein-Rogge & Theodor Loos & Fritz Rasp et al, director Fritz Lang, caption
The workers’ city far below the surface of the earth. ibid.
And high above, a pleasure garden for the sons of the masters of Metropolis. ibid.
Look, these are your brothers. ibid. woman in sky city
I wanted to see what my brothers looked like. ibid. hero
It was their hands that built this city of ours, father. ibid.
What will you do if they turn against you some day? ibid.
The machine! Someone must stay with the machine. ibid.
I have created a machine in the image of man that never tires or makes a mistake. ibid. inventor
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies. ibid.
The workers are destroying the machines. ibid.
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
Are you a lucky little lady in the City of Light? Or just another lost angel ... City of Night? Jim Morrison
The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century – or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Mozart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
I don’t know what London's coming to – the higher the buildings the lower the morals. Noël Coward, Collected Sketches and Lyrics
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim. Christopher Morley
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running. Edward Albee
Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub. Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler
The city’s full of people who you just see around. Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things. Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash – all of them – surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? Emil Cioran
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family – in another city. George Burns
We have soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonizers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads and in subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will got to town to rest and get well. Nikola Tesla
The story of Detroit’s bankruptcy was simple enough: allow capitalism to grow the city, campaign against income inequality, tax the job creators until they flee, increase government spending in order to boost employment, promise generous pension plans to keep people voting for failure. Rinse, wash and repeat. Ben Shapiro
The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together – and failed. Neil MacGregor
Every city in the world always has a gang, a street gang, or the so-called outcasts. Jimi Hendrix
Cities are the abyss of the human species. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. George Orwell
I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all. Michelangelo
Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There’s shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind. Beck Hansen