#cities

It was never built for the comfort and happiness of its citizens, but to astonish the world. ↗

— Susan Ertz

#new-york-city #anger

Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England. ↗

— Archibald MacLeish

#around #blinds #cities #come #come and go

Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark. ↗

— Theodore Parker

#been #cities #civilization #dark #heat

All men, even those we call savages, have been so tormented by the passion for strong drinks, that limited as their capacities were, they were yet able to manufacture them. ↗

— Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

#been #call #capacities #drinks #even

I don't know what goes on in the crowd. I've had them show up and throw beer cans at me. I caused riots in most of the major cities. ↗

— Lou Reed

#cans #caused #cities #crowd #goes

With four of the top ten most violent cities in America, Michigan will never fully flourish unless our governments can fulfill their basic task: protecting public safety. ↗

— Bill Schuette

#basic #cities #flourish #four #fulfill

With its population made up of two categories of people, those who do business and those upon whom they prey, the city has only a painful life to offer the young person who goes there to learn and to study; for sooner or later anyone who lives there, whatever his constitution, becomes disturbed and is eventually deranged and destroyed by the city, often in the most deadly and insidious manner. ↗

— Thomas Bernhard

#urban-life #business

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. ↗

— Italo Calvino

#invisible #life #travel #traveling #change

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

#fictional-london #imagination #life #literary-london #literature

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#cities #colonialism #exploitation #first-world #human-rights