Cities - City Quotes

The city’s heat is like a leaden pall – Its lowered lamps glow in the midnight air Like mammoth orange-moths that flit and flare Through the dark tapestry of night. The tall Black houses crush the creeping beggars down.

The most dangerous savages live in cities.

The cry of the ghetto is being heard by a nation with its fingers in its ears.

Men, by associating in large masses, as in camps and cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds, but weaken their morals; thus a retrocession in the one, is too often the price they pay for a refinement of the other.

In the country the darkness of night is friendly and familiar, but in a city, with its blaze of lights, it is unnatural, hostile and menacing. It is like a monstrous vulture that hovers, biding its time.

London, as a city only, and as its walls and liberties line it out, might, indeed, be viewed in a small compass; but, when I speak of London, now in the modern acceptation, you expect I shall take in all that vast mass of buildings, reaching from Black-Wall in the east, to Tot-Hill Fields in […]

In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized – no bond, no fellow feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers and appetites walking.

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

Between about 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lone footsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. All work that has to be done at those hours is useful–in bakeries, for example. Even the newspaper presses stop turning forests into lies. Now and […]

The city is a circus of the senses.