Hugo de Grotius Quotes

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.

Good and bad make up a city.

London is a vast, complex city designed by the same guy who created the Habitrail.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

Annexation is probably the most valuable tool a city has to ensure orderly growth and development.

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

When I thought about Detroit, I would think big city, very urban - not a lot of places to walk around, not a lot of parks. I sort of pictured Manhattan almost, where, besides Central Park, it's all city and big buildings. But now that I'm here, you see people pushing strollers, people hanging out in the park.

The city is as large as Seville or Cordova; its streets, I speak of the principal ones, are very wide and straight; some of these, and all the inferior ones, are half land and half water, and are navigated by canoes.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads 'arteries' and so forth.

Urbanization is the dominant demographic trend of our time.

In order to sustain such large number and such immense cities as Cahokia and Tiahuanaco, the original Americans had to do more than pick berries, they had to transform their environment.