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Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.
-Italian Proverb
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I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this: If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.
-Spiro T. Agnew
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Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.
-Fred A. Allen
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The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.
-Fred A. Allen
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A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
-Aristotle
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And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening...
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/109.html
-Matthew Arnold
Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough
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I found Rome brick, I left it marble.
-Caesar Augustus
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We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
-Jane Austen
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One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
-Jane Austen
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The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
-Charles Baudelaire
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The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
-Jean Baudrillard
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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.
-Jean Baudrillard
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Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.
-Walter Benjamin
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Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
-John Berger
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When in Rome, do as Rome does.
-Ambrose Bierce
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In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future
-Daniel J. Boorstin
The Democratic Experience, ch. 33, Random House (1973)
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I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage.
-Alan Brien
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What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.
-Joseph Brodsky
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Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.
-Rupert Brooke
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The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
-Italo Calvino
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As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
-Albert Camus
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New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.
-Johnny Carson
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From up high where I was, you could shout anything you liked at them. I tried. They made me sick, the whole lot of them. I hadn't the nerve to tell them so in the daytime, to their face, but up there it was safe. Help! Help! I shouted, just to see if it would have any effect on them. None whatsoever. Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time.
-Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Journey to the End of the Night, 1932
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Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. About Paris
-Sebastian Roch Nicolas Chamfort
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A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
-John Ciardi
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Books about City Life, Cities
