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Cities

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What's Rome to me, what business have I there? / I who can neither lie, nor falsely swear? / Nor praise my patron's undeserving rhymes, / Nor yet comply with him, nor with his times? ~ Juvenal
When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?” What will you answer? “We all dwell together to make money from each other”? or “This is a community”? ~ T. S. Eliot
Not so long ago, I examined some maps showing juvenile delinquency, diptheria, tuberculosis and murder quotients in a number of cities from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The maps all looked alike. Disease, crime and delinquency were invariably grouped in the same parts of the cities — in the slum districts. That is the cause of crime, not the motion picture. ~ Humphrey Bogart
To anyone growing up in any large city, the immediate neighborhood becomes the world. The street on which one lives provides a kid with local identification somewhat similar to being branded by national origin. Streets have a status. They grow, get old and change in character. In large coastal cities, immigration has an effect on the profile of a street altering it as each new group enters, stays a while, assimilates and then moves away. Streets seem to have a discernible life. Some start out ostentatiously and gradually descend into slums while others begin as poor the disreputable neighborhoods and rise to ostentation through what city planners call gentrification. ~ Will Eisner
Latin America is particularly susceptible to pockets of crime because of its speedy urbanization. Its cities grew faster than in most other parts of the world during the past 50 years, according to the Economist. By 2000, three-quarters of the population lived in towns and cities. That is about double the proportion in Asia and Africa.
As the Economist explains, “that move from the countryside concentrated risk factors for lethal violence — inequality, unemployed young men, dislocated families, poor government services, easily available firearms — even as it also brought together the factors needed for economic growth.” ~ Amanda Erickson
Cities, like cats, reveal themselves at night ~ Rupert Brooke
The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual’s dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Cities are relatively large and long lasting human settlements. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.

Quotes

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  • No town has greater right on you than the other. The best town for you is that which bears you.
  • When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.
    • Aristotle, Politics, book 1, chapter 2; reported in Aristotle’s Politics and Poetics (translation by Benjamin Jowett and Thomas Twining, 1952), p. 5.
  • Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime,—
    A rose-red city—half as old as time!
    • John William Burgon, Petra. A Prize Poem Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June 4, 1845, lines 131–132. Oxford: Francis Macpherson (1845), p. 14.
  • A city has to be a place where you can get everything – and do anything, or nothing.
    • Herbert Eugene Caen, A city is like San Francisco, not a faceless 'burb. The San Francisco Chronicle, published Sunday, October 31, 2010, sfgate.com.
  • If you are a Christian, no earthly city is yours. Of our City ‘the Builder and Maker is God.’ Though we may gain possession of the whole world, we are withal but strangers and sojourners in it all. We are enrolled in heaven: our citizenship is there! Let us not, after the manner of little children, despise things that are great, and admire those which are little! Not our city’s greatness, but virtue of soul is our ornament and defence. If you suppose dignity to belong to a city, think how many persons must partake in this dignity, who are whoremongers, effeminate, depraved and full of ten thousand evil things, and at last despise such honour! But that City above is not of this kind; for it is impossible that he can be a partaker of it, who has not exhibited every virtue.
  • God made the country, and man made the town.
  • The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it. It encircles you with forces much greater than the walls and gates which imitate tinier villages or towns. People who come to it come seeking the future, not realizing all that will finally affect them in it is their own, only more or less aware, involvement with the past. The way we do things here—really, that’s all there is to be learned in our precincts. But in the paving of every wide, clear avenue, in the turnings of every dark, overhung alley, in the ornaments on every cornice, in the salt-stained stones of each neighborhood cistern, there are traces of the way things once were done—which is the key to why they are done as they are today.
  • To anyone growing up in any large city, the immediate neighborhood becomes the world. The street on which one lives provides a kid with local identification somewhat similar to being branded by national origin. Streets have a status. They grow, get old and change in character. In large coastal cities, immigration has an effect on the profile of a street altering it as each new group enters, stays a while, assimilates and then moves away. Streets seem to have a discernible life. Some start out ostentatiously and gradually descend into slums while others begin as poor the disreputable neighborhoods and rise to ostentation through what city planners call gentrification.
  • When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
  • My troops are bound to me as a cow is bound to its calf; but like a son who, hating his mother, leaves his city, my princely sister holy Inana has run away from me back to brick-built Kulaba. If she loves her city and hates me, why does she bind the city to me? If she hates the city and yet loves me, why does she bind me to the city?
  • Round about [there will be] eighteen thousand [cubits]; and the name of the city from [that] day on will be Jehovah Himself Is There.
  • Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.
    • Hesiod Works and Days (c. 700 BC) variant translation: Oft hath even a whole city reaped the evil fruit of a bad man.
    • line 240.
  • The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
  • The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual’s dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.
    • Lyndon B. Johnson, special message to the Congress on the nation's cities (March 2, 1965); reported in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965, book 1, p. 240.
  • What's Rome to me, what business have I there?
I who can neither lie, nor falsely swear?
Nor praise my patron's undeserving rhymes,
Nor yet comply with him, nor with his times?
  • Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke.
  • Go through that city, and behold
    What intellect can yield,
    How it brings forth an hundred-fold
    From time’s enduring field.
    Those walls are filled with wealth, the spoil
    Of industry and thought,
    The mighty harvest which man’s toil
    Out of the past has wrought.
  • How wonderful the common street,
    Its tumult and its throng,
    The hurrying of the thousand feet
    That bear life's cares along.
    How strongly is the present felt,
    With such a scene beside;
    All sounds in one vast murmur melt
    The thunder of the tide.
  • I do own I have a most affectionate attachment for London—the deep voice of her multitudes "haunts me like a passion." I delight in observing the infinite variety of her crowded streets, the rich merchandise of the shops, the vast buildings, whether raised for pomp, commerce, or charity, down to the barrel-organ, whose music is only common because it is beautiful. The country is no more left as it was originally created, than Belgrave Square remains its pristine swamp. The forest has been felled, the marsh drained, the enclosures planted, and the field ploughed. All these, begging Mr. Cowper’s pardon, are the works of man’s hands; and so is the town—the one is not more artificial than the other.
  • Any price is worth paying to get away from the thought-destroying din and soul-killing routine of the city!
    • Fritz Leiber, Diary in the Snow (1947) in the collection Night’s Black Agents
  • I am a child of the city. I was born in one, but that alone is not enough to make a man want, even need, to live and die in one, not even the city of his birth is London, as mine is. Millions are born in cities and flee them, London included; others go on living in them and become more and more unhappy. I think I can understand what moves those who cannot endure city life, but that is largely because the things they cannot abide are the very things that made cities so attractive to me in the first place.
  • To burn a city, there is needed only a child or a madman; but to rebuild it, architects, materials, workmen, money, and especially time, will be required.
    • Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809), XXXVIII
  • The greatest division of material and mental labour is the separation of town and country.
    • Karl Marx, The German Ideology
    • The Marx-Engels Reader
  • The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.
  • The size of a town rarely determines my pleasure. If a person does not enjoy a small town, it's likely he is too small-minded to delight in the ordinary.
  • [Solon] being asked, namely, what city was best to live in, “That city,” he replied, “in which those who are not wronged, no less than those who are wronged, exert themselves to punish the wrongdoers.”
    • Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin (1914), life of Solon, section 18, vol. 1, p. 455.
  • Petite ville, grand renom.
    • Small town, great renown.
    • François Rabelais, Pantagruel (1532), Book V, Chapter XXXV. Of Chinon, Rabelais's native town.
  • We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.
    • Theodore Roosevelt, "The City in Modern Life", Literary Essays (vol. 12 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed., 1926), p. 226. Book review in The Atlantic Monthly (April 1895).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (And Later)

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 121-22.
  • Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenæ,
    Hæ septem certant de stirpe insignis Homeri.
    • Smyrna, Rhodes, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athens—these seven cities contend as to being the birthplace of the illustrious Homer. (The second line sometimes runs "Orbis de patria certat, Homere, tua.")
    • Anonymous translation from Greek. Same in Antipater of Sidon.
  • The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.
    • Euripides, Encomium on Alcibiades. (Probably quoted). See Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes.
  • In the busy haunts of men.
  • Seven cities warr'd for Homer being dead,
    Who living had no roofe to shroud his head.
  • Far from gay cities, and the ways of men.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book 14, line 410. Pope's translation.
  • Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.
  • Friends and loves we have none, nor wealth, nor blest abode
    But the hope, the burning hope, and the road, the lonely road.
    Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind,
    For we go seeking cities that we shall never find.
  • Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.
    • Matthew. V. 14.
  • Towered cities please us then,
    And the busy hum of men.
  • Nisi Dominus frustra.
    • Unless the Lord keep the city the watchman waketh in vain (lit., unless the Lord in vain).
    • Motto of City of Edinburgh, adapted from Psalms. CVII. 1. Vulgate.
  • Fields and trees are not willing to teach me anything; but this can be effected by men residing in the city.
    • Plato, Works, Volume III. The Phædrus.
  • I dwelt in a city enchanted,
    And lonely indeed was my lot;
    * * * * *
    Though the latitude's rather uncertain,
    And the longitude also is vague,
    The persons I pity who know not the City
    The beautiful City of Prague.
    • W. J. Prowse, The City of Prague ("Little Village on Thames.").
  • Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion,… the city of the great King.
    • Psalms. XLVIII. 2.
  • Great Homer's birthplace seven rival cities claim,
    Too mighty such monopoly of Fame.
  • Urbem lateritiam accepit, mamoream relinquit.
    • He [Cæsar Augustus] found a city built of brick; he left it built of marble.
    • Suetonius, (adapted), Cæsar Augustus, 28.
  • The city of dreadful night.
  • Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana ædificavit urbes.
  • This poor little one-horse town.
  • Fuimus Troes; fuit Ilium.
  • Those who live in the present have a future.

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
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Wiktionary
Wiktionary
Look up cities in Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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