Clive Thompson Quotes

The cities are the principal home and seat of the human group. They are the coral colony for Man, the collective being.

I see the city as an organism, shaped through time by the little humans having habits and doing millions of stuff in and out of it.

Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

Cities are the greatest creations of humanity.

All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable lives, and in constant intercourse with one another, will build a city as beautiful as Paris.

By 2050, seven out of ten people will live in cities, which will account for six billion people living in urban areas. That phenomenon is central to all the challenges humanity faces. If there is an issue to be addressed, then it is certainly happening in cities and therefore must be considered on an urban scale.

Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons. They've come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That's why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.

Urbanization is the dominant demographic trend of our time.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else

Cities are created by and for traffic.

Industrialization, by drawing people from the countryside to the cities brings with it the weakening of traditional political and social support systems.

When 125,000 people are gathered together on 10 square miles of land they must of necessity give up certain of their liberties. It is a sacrifice they must make for the sake of the advantages of city life.

The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.

...the concentration of human beings in towns...is contrary to nature, and...this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population...countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children...are starved of air and space and sunshine. ...This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilization and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathize with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us...the air must be purified...the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean...the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.

The city of Peking [Beijing] is a novel site for a European. He will not weary of admiring the manner in which the nearly 3 million people gathered within its vast enclosure are ruled by the police as schoolchildren by their masters. People coming and going fill streets wider than the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The crowd is beyond belief, yet peace reigns everywhere.

Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.

I don't want to bring a European city or an east-coast city to the West Coast.

Cities are important because that's where the majority of the world's population lives and an even bigger share of the global economy resides.

We thought a human city is kind of like that watering hole. It's where different groups come together and have to find ways to live and survive and cohabit and cooperate, but they may not always see eye-to-eye.

People make a city, it's not the other way round.

[At] the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. And we cannot see that as a problem.