Oswald Spengler Quotes

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.

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

In an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility.

It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

London is the greatest city in the world, but we're at a crossroads. Ordinary Londoners have been priced out of our city because of the housing crises. We're a city that's growing in population, but the infrastructure can't cope with the growth.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

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

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

In fact, the public will accept any city plan and skyline provided that its architecture is traditional.

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows.

It is very difficult to say nowadays where the suburbs of London come to an end and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country have turned the countryside into a city.

From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation

These monster cities we live in today are blights of modern society. They will certainly give way to planned cities interlinked to the countryside. Everybody will live with the natural advantages of the country and the cultural associations of the town.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.

Cities are natural, that's why they're everywhere. It's not like there's only one city, and everybody's like 'What the f**k is this?' No, cities are all over the place. They're natural. You know what's not natural? You, in the middle of the mountains, in the middle of the winter.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

There are so many cities in every single city.

[Ayres] was our city because we were building it. That's how I felt when I walked around town.

The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.