Divided We Stand Quotes

“In Lower Manhattan’s city of towers, one gives no thought to the mythic emblems of the earth’s limitless fecundity: cornucopia bursting with sheaves of grain, vegetables, and ripe, edible fruit. Instead we imagine bounties of debt, harvests of financial instruments. No longer fortresses or cathedral spires, our towers have transformed into urban silos, overflowing with disembodied commodities.”
― Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography Of New York's World Trade Center

“In the farming economy, buildings had counted for little, for it was in the fields surrounding them that the source of all productive value lay. But in the modern city, land became the launching pad for new vertical economies—derived from the acreage beneath but multiplied by the number of square feet that could be built above. Here wealth turned increasingly mobile and intangible as it wrested itself free from the earth-bound limitations of agricultural or even factory production.”
― Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography Of New York's World Trade Center