Richard Nixon Quotes

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

Atlanta is totally destroyed. I don’t think that people will live there any more.

In New York, you have thousands of buildings that have never been renovated, that have horrible designs, that are really cramped and terrible.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

I watched the mighty skyline fall

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

I grew up in the Bronx, but in Riverdale - not exactly an area of New York that's known for being rough and tumble.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

But I can tell you that the New York that I see now is not the New York that we grew up in. It's not 1973.

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.

… the greatest act of civic vandalism in New York’s history.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

If you don’t put positive things in the city’s open spaces, they will be filled by negative things.

Not every town can or should be saved.

I definitely think New York is a very, very vibrant, wonderful city, but I certainly, of course, can't help but miss a lot of the stuff that's no longer there.

Liberals want to live downtown. All over America - in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Georgetown - there are crowds of liberals living in the gritty, ugly, dirty neighborhoods sensible people are trying to flee.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

Paris has long been a palimpsest of different cities, each new iteration grafted on top of the still visible last, spanning the extremes of human excellence and beauty and, just as crucially, filth and squalor.