Frank Lloyd Wright Quotes

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.

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

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

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

I don't like concrete jungles.

The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

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

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

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

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

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

Dublin dwindles so beautifully; there is no harsh separation between it and the country. It fades away, whereas London seems to devour the country; an army of buildings come and take away a beautiful park, and you never seem to get quite out of sight of a row of houses.

Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I'd never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.

I'm from Sacramento, and I have no idea what growing up in a city is like.

I really like Pietermaritzburg: it is really a course for me - really technical.

Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.

Where I grew up was a place called Salford, which was the industrial heartland of Manchester. And where I lived in Salford, I could walk to the center of Manchester within about 20 minutes. So I lived really close to the center.

Shanghai was a peculiar city: so many people; everyone seemed to be working all the time. The skyline was beautiful.