#cities

Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services. ↗

— Rodney Stark

#cities #urbanization #family

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

— Anna Quindlen

#city-life #london #urban-geography #imagination

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal. ↗

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

#civilization #great-cities #love

Men of sense often learn from their enemies. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. ↗

— Aristophanes

#cities #foes #friends #high #learn

Spend twenty years there and you ask yourself how there can still be strangers with so many familiar faces ... it's probably that cities generate strangers continuously ... ↗

— Frederik Peeters

#strangers #love

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#small-towns #men

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities. ↗

— Cecil Beaton

#american cities #cities #european #francisco #most

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point. ↗

— Linda Chavez

#become #darfur #destructive #institution #irrelevant

We receive reports now on a daily basis from our own people on the ground in Darfur on widespread atrocities and grave violations of human rights against the civilian population. ↗

— Jan Egeland

#atrocities #basis #civilian #daily #daily basis

Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century. ↗

— Paul Goldberger

#angeles #atlanta #big #century #cities