The City Always Wins Quotes

“Cairo: the future city, the new metropole of plants cascading from solar-paneled roofs to tree-lined avenues with white washed facades abut careful restorations and integrated innovations all shining together in a chorus of new and old. Civil initiatives will soon find easy housing in the abandoned architectural prizes of Downtown, the river will be flooded with public transportation, the shaded spaces underneath bridges and flyovers will flower into common land connected by tramways to dignified schools and clean hospitals and eclectic bookshops and public parks humming with music in the evenings. The revolution has begun and people, every day, are supplanting the regime with their energy and initiative in this cement super colony that for decades of state failure has held itself together with a collective supraintelligence keeping it from collapse. Something here, in Cairo's combination of permanence and piety and proximity, bound people together.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“The young do all the dying and the old go to the polls to vote for other old fucks to tell the young what to do.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“At least fascists are never funny.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“There's no escaping the electromagnetic swamp of sound trash.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“Are we in some sick laboratory? Can you take this man, this black hole of charisma, this oozing miasma of featurelessness and turn him into a leader? Can you follow the simplest playbook of power and morph this Quasimodean combination of bureaucrat's paunch, jowled cheeks, and balding scalp into a demagogue of the month to be washed down with your Coke? Identify existential enemy, mobilise killing forces, pump hysterical nationalism onto airwaves, pose for photos with lions, use basic fonts, invoke mythological pasts, have choirs of children sing your name, and voilà: sit back and look upon your works.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“When people talk about the Cairo of the past he can never truly believe the picture they paint. Cairo University was all miniskirts and Vespas and cycling down clean, wide streets in black-and-white movies.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“Cairo is jazz. Not lounge jazz, not the commodified lobby jazz that works to blanch history, but the heat of New Orleans and gristle of Chicago: the jazz that is beauty in the destruction of the past, the jazz of an unknown future, the jazz that promises freedom from the bad old times.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“We are the target, we are the oppressed, we are the front line, and while everyone else has shattered their political axes into impotent fragments, what more cohesive force is there than simply: women.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

“My son … he … he said he came alive in Tahrir.”
― Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins