City Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

For what fortress, what city, in the wide extent of the Roman empire, can hope to exist, secure and impregnable, if it is our pleasure that it should be erased from the earth?

For a moment, sitting there in above the city, I imagined life outside narcissism. I wondered how beautiful it might be to think of others as more important than myself. I wondered at how peaceful it might be not to be pestered by that childish voice that wants for pleasures and attention. I wondered what it would be like not to live in a house of mirrors, evereywhere I go being reminded of myself.

The masses were hurt and they showed it. Deepa Mehta and Shabana Azami would never have left the city if they had the people's support.

You have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not accept rules. Therefore I t'ink you will either make a very good scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York, and you can give lectures for a living or even become, if you get to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyway, it will be interesting.

A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches, had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.

Remember all the time…that Hollywood is an Oriental city. As long as you do that you might survive.

Olivia de Havilland

Mammon, n. The god of the world's leading religion. His chief temple is in the holy city of New York.

Pillars are fallen at thy feet,
Fanes quiver in the air,
A prostrate city is thy seat,
And thou alone art there.

Lydia Maria Child

Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.

She realized all at once that Doon, thin, dark eyed Doon, with his troublesome temper and his terrible brown jacket, and his good heart— was the person she knew better than anyone now. He was her best friend. —City of Ember—

I'm all for Workers' Rights and stuff like that, that's fair enough. But imagine if you were working in a pub in some real rough-arse of inner-city North Dublin,... and you're built like, say, me. And you've got to go up to some bloke who looks like he's been lured down from a mountain with a hunk of meat, and he's just trying to enjoy his 'post-fight' cigarette, and you've got to tell him to put it out. Somewhere in the back of your head you're going to be thinking "Oh, thank you so much to the government for looking after my health." [pauses] Somewhere in the back of your head, where your nose is about to be.

I saw how different life was on different sides of the same city. I saw the fear in the eyes of people who were not free. I saw the gratitude of people toward the United States for all that we had done. I felt goosebumps as I got off a military train and heard the Army band strike up 'Stars and Stripes Forever.'

I felt once more the strange equivocal power of the city—its flat alluvial landscape and exhausted airs... Alexandria; which is neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.

Lawrence Durrell

Who is better fitted to run the railroads and the gas plants and the ferries than the men who make a business of lookin' after the interests of the city?

George Washington Plunkitt

Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct [democracy], rather than a representative democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything.

Will you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge.

Dear Mr. Rossellini, I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only "ti amo," I am ready to come and make a film with you.

O bright and violet-crowned and famed in song, bulwark of Greece, famous Athens, divine city!

A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it's incomplete.

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force.

Robert F. Kennedy

Blood City III: The Massacre. I'd read the summary of it online, and frankly, it sounded like the directors had just decided to film my life.

James Patterson

Hand took a breath and opened his palms, as if accepting the gift of rain. "YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY!" he bellowed into the cold exhausted city.

And when they went away, leaving comfort behind, I think there were not in all the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.

Louisa May Alcott

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

This affair is a pretty just sample of most of the successful battles of this 'great general.'... the soldiery amused themselves by sacking the city, and by perpetrating every species of outrage that their mercenary and licentious appetites could devise. Their savage propensities were particularly exercised against the few foreigners that were found in the place. Meanwhile I was journeying very leisurely towards Durango, where I arrived on the 21st of April.