Cities Quotes

“Good cities cultivate welcoming business environments.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“At Mayflower-Plymouth, we pride ourselves on providing holistic solutions. Businesses have problems, cities have problems, society has problems… and we have solutions to those problems. And me being a polymath and the founder of the company means that polymath spirit is embedded in the company’s nature. We like to solve all kinds of problems and present all kinds of solutions across various industries.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“Good cities implement good systems design - systems that cultivate life, systems that utilize waste, systems that promote wellbeing among its residents.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“When cities prioritize sustainability, the residents in that city are more inclined to embrace sustainability as well.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“Cities that prioritize being in harmony with nature, experience a variety of benefits including less waste, less crime, less mental health problems, a greater sense of community among residents, greater biodiversity, and so much more.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are providing solutions to help cities improve along these lines.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“Good cities are integrated with nature, not separate from nature. A good city works with nature instead of against it. And the greatest cities are nearly indistinguishable from nature.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“One of the great themes of nature is abundance. One of the great themes of every city should also be abundance. In every city, there should be an abundance of opportunities, an abundance of food, an abundance of available homes, an abundance of biodiversity, an abundance of spaces to play.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, Principles of a Permaculture Economy

“The city doesn't beckon or lend me a shoulder today. Maybe it knows I'm about to leave. The sun's dull disk defeats me; the dense sky is the same one that will carry me away. The vast and vaporous territory, lacking precise pathways, is all that binds us together now. But it never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never holds on to the people that pass through it. The sky contains nothing of our spirit, it doesn't care. Always shifting, altering its aspect from one moment to the next, it can't be defined.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia.

None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Lots of things define what it means to be a good city. But one thing all good cities have in common is lots of trees integrated into the design of the city. Trees are vital to a thriving city.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

“The sun is out, the air is not so cold, and there is so much to love about a city like New York.

The food, the art, the constant offerings of culture—though Addie’s favorite thing is its scale. Towns and villages are easily conquered. A week in Villon was enough to walk every path, to earn every face. But with cities like Paris, London, Chicago, New York, she doesn’t have to pace herself, doesn’t have to take small bites to make the newness last. A city she can consume as hungrily as she likes, devour it every day and never run out of things to eat.

It is the kind of place that takes years to visit, and still there always seems to be another alley, another set of steps, another door.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“But that is the brilliant thing about New York. Addie has wandered a fair portion of the five boroughs, and the city still has its secrets, some tucked in corners—basement bars, speakeasies, members-only clubs—and others sitting in plain sight. Like easter eggs in a movie, the ones you don’t notice until the second or third viewing. And not like Easter eggs at all, because no matter how many times she walks these blocks, no matter how many hours, or days, or years she spends learning the contour of New York, as soon as she turns her back it seems to shift again, reassemble. Buildings go up and come down, businesses open and close, people arrive and depart and the deck shuffles itself again and again and again.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Sometimes a city occupies an entire mountain; the clouds, trees and sun of the mountain disappear, but the inhabitants of that city continue their lives without knowing what they killed!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Die Stadt war so groß. Und Emil war so klein. Und kein Mensch wollte wissen, warum er kein Geld hatte, und warum er nicht wusste, wo er austeigen sollte. Vier Millionen Menschen lebten in Berlin und keiner interessierte sich für Emil Tischbein. Niemand will von den Sorgen des andern etwas wissen. Jeder hat mit seinen eigenen Sorgen und Freuden genug zu tun. Und wenn man sagt: >>Das tut mir aber wirklich leid<<, so meint man meistens gar nichts weiter als: >>Mensch, lass mich bloß in Ruhe!<<”
― Erich Kästner, Emil und die Detektive

“New ideas need old buildings.”
― Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

“The advantage of a big city, move on a few meters and you find solitude again.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum

“It is difficult, when we look back on certain periods of our lives, not to succumb to romanticism and nostalgia. Even while I lived in London, though, I romanticised the city and the life I lived there; or rather, I knew it was a beautiful, romantic time of life, and that, like youth itself, the circumstances that had come so magically together would never be repeated, and that one day I would regret those years. Although I sometimes tantalise myself with the idea of moving to London again, I don't need Heraclitus to remind me that you can't step into the same city twice. The London where I lived no longer exists, any more than a dream exists upon awakening - a dream in which you were happy, in which life lived up to its promise.”
― Rob Doyle, Autobibliography

“Cities are architecture plus space and time.”
― Peter F. Smith, The Dynamics of Delight: Architecture and Aesthetics

“Cities dream of other cities.”
― Franco La Cecla, Against Architecture

“The world of silence that endures inside the stones and the bricks, a world devoid of thoughts, feelings or desires, astounds and frightens them. And life without desires seems even more unbearable than the life without fulfillments that is experienced every day by many an inhabitant of the city.”
― Magdalena Tulli, Dreams and Stones

“It almost felt as if Istanbul had become a blissful metropolis, romantically picturesque, just like Paris, thought Zeliha; not that she had ever been to Paris.”
― Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul

“What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“He loved New York. He hated it. It was a cathedral of possibilities, it would never settle down.”
― Jonathan Lee

“But compared to Germany, the U.S. might as well be in the Third World, especially if we're talking about health care. Why did every other advanced country get through the pandemic so much better than the U.S.? Maybe you don't feel it so much here in the sticks, but out there people are still really suffering.”
― Sigrid Nunez, Salvation City

“In a city, any city, one can be anonymous; this is the blessing of cities.”
― Lauren Groff, The Monsters of Templeton

“Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind. It really is a trip inside the collective psyche of a compacted group of people.”
― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

“Architecture should reflect the past and the present with the future in mind.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Buildings dream at night, and their dreams have a particular character. Or perhaps at night they awaken. There is nothing cordial or accommodating about buildings, whatever they might let people believe. The stresses of simply standing there, preposterous constructions, Euclidian like nothing in nature, the ground heaving under them, rain seeping in while their joints go slack with rot. They speak disgruntlement, creaks and groans, and less nameable sounds that suggest presence of the kind that is conjured only by emptiness. Grudges, plaints, and threats, an interior conversation, not meant to be heard, that would startle anyone. Jack had never realized before that the city, the parts he knew of it, might despise its human infestation.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Jack

“Your memory of the dead is like the rain—
rain colors itself same as the place it falls on:

say, entire cities, streets, & buildings.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Let Toronto become Milan. Montreal will always be Rome.”
― Jean Drapeau