Urban Danger Quotes

Never take an elevator in city hall.

In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.

Philly ain't a good environment for you when you headed in a different direction. Bad things happen left and right. You might walk up the street, make a wrong turn, and your whole life could flip.

When I first travelled to New York in 1982 on a summer holiday as a student, I remember thinking how exciting it was, how energising it felt, and also how it felt dangerous - it was a place where you could make a wrong turn, either geographically or just in a human interaction, and suddenly find yourself in trouble.

I'm terrified to ride a bike in a city - and I grew up riding bikes in the city. I've just heard enough stories - I have enough friends who've been hit by taxicabs and things.

The most dangerous savages live in cities.

Now 4th street park after dark is dangerous, might get clapped, if you look strange to us

It was so strange because I thought Washington was going to be so grown-up, and everyone was going to be so nice. Then people were saying to me, 'Watch your back in D.C.' Why? Really? I have to watch my back in D.C?

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

The second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.

If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.

In the city one clings to nostalgic and unreal signs of community, takes forced refuge in codes, badges and coteries; the city's life, of surfaces and locomotion, usually seems too dangerous and demanding to live through with any confidence.

There's always elements of danger in New York, but people are always out on the street. I don't feel scared there at all.

In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.

Sometimes Buenos Aires is not so safe. You are scared to have someone behind you at night.

Big cities do evoke a sense of menace.

I've almost been hit by a lot of things in New York City. I am pretty sure I have almost been hit by a bike messenger before.

On my first day in New York a guy asked me if I knew where Central Park was. When I told him I didn't he said, 'Do you mind if I mug you here?'.

The open street, like the open sea, is an inviting thing to the mind of man. It is one of the few places where all may meet as equals under sun or rain; but only a John Bunyan could adequately portray the danger of the cities with their pitfalls for the young unguarded feet.

It's always been the same, growing up in Manhattan... the idea of living within a giant archer's target... for use by the bad Russia bowman with the atomic arrows.

I find it too terrifying to go out in L.A.

In some neighborhoods, if you want to walk down the streets, you've got two choices - look down, or look hard.

I've always thought it would be fun to update "Hansel and Gretel." I'd have these white parents in the suburbs with an income of fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Daddy loses his job, and the wicked stepmother says, "We could get along, we could keep our Mastercharge, if you'd just get rid of those shitty kids." Finally the father hires a limo and tells the driver, "Drop 'em off on Lenox Avenue in Harlem at two in the morning." These two little white kids land there. They're menaced. And this supposedly nice black lady says, "Would you like some candy?"

I am afraid if there is anything to be afraid of. A precipice cannot hurt you. Lions and tigers can. The streets of New York I consider more dangerous than the Matterhorn to a thoroughly competent and careful climber.

The freedom of the city is the freedom of expression and the freedom of the mind. So precious is this freedom that the citizens judge the city's squalor for its promise .... It is in the nature of great cities to be dangerous, just as it is in the nature of the future to be dangerous.