Bernard Sumner Quotes

I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories.

I was brought up in industrial south Lancashire, down the cobbled road from where LS Lowry (1887-1976) lived and painted.

St. Louis sprawls where mighty rivers meet - as broad as Philadelphia, but three stories high instead of two, with wider streets and dirtier atmosphere, over the dull-brown of wide, calm rivers. The city overflows into the valleys of Illinois and lies there, writhing under its grimy cloud.

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

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.

A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a fools-cap crown On a fool's head - and there is London Town.

This London City, with all of its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic an tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick.

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

I want people to be excited about cooling towers and megasheds; they're as much part of our history as the rural barn.

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

Cities perform most functions in a very Industrial Age model.

I find industrial cities exciting. I like their toughness.

Most cities have a centre surrounded by suburbs, but London has numerous centres: it's the model of a twenty-first century metropolis.

A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.

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

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

Asia is still dominated by skyscrapers. I hope that, in European cities, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary.

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.

The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.

We then journeyed on to London Street, down which the tidal ditch continues its course.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

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

Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.

In 2007, the majority of the world’s population – over 3 billion of us – will live in urban areas for the first time in history.

Cities are immortal.