Urban Conflict Quotes

The Negro fought in the war, and … he’s not gonna keep taking the shit we’re dishing out. We’re in a race with time. If we don’t act, we’re gonna have blood in the streets.

I love William Shakespeare. He wrote some of the rawest stories. I mean look at Romeo and Juliet. That's some serious ghetto expletive. You got this guy Romeo from the Bloods who falls for Juliet, a female from the Crips, and everybody in both gangs are against them. So they have to sneak out and they end up dead for nothing. Real tragic stuff.

Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.

Before we find world peace, we gotta find peace in the war on the streets.

Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.

Talking about winning and losing is like if you're talking about two armies fighting on two territories, which is not the case. Those [terrorists] are gangs, coming from abroad, infiltrate inhabited areas, kill the people, take their houses, and shoot at the army. The army cannot do the same, and the army doesn't exist everywhere.

Anyone who lives in N.Y.C. will tell you that getting into a confrontation on a city street is a complete nightmare 100 percent of the time.

Cities are drivers of growth and wealth, and at the same time, cities are becoming increasingly violent.

A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honour of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him. His infantile countenance was livid with the fury of battle. His small body was writhing in the delivery of oaths.

So you think that hip-hop had it's start out in Queensbridge, If you popped that junk up in the Bronx you might not live.

I think people need to watch 'Chi-Raq' because you need to know what's happening in your back yard.

Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.

Living in the city is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city, a place to which one goes to do business, is a place where men overreach each other in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

I do not like confrontations in New York City.

The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed, windows closed, shutters closed. A house is an escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears, sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge. It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.

For the span of my memory, this has been a city of opposing wills.

Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

If you think that the intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulka .

When you besiege a city with guns and aircraft, you are driving the good citizens and the bad elements together.

...the divided world of Aspen, where locals with a sense of entitlement were pitted against developers with a sense of condominiums.

We cannot prevent rebels from entering cities and burning property..

Wish all the Farmers would move to town one year, that's the only way I know to clear the thing up.

I'm a good little middle-class boy. I live in Gloucestershire or Kensington. I don't exist in the war zone, but it's certainly not far away. I grew up in an area where it is a war zone - south London.

Shootouts are not gunfights of honor, they're gang wars and racial riots.