“When you clean up a city, you destroy it.”

— Charles Bukowski

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Charles Bukowski 555

American writer 1920–1994

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“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

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“You destroy buildings, fight monsters openly in the streets of the city, work with the police, show up in newspapers, advertise in the phone book, and ride zombie dinosaurs down Michigan Avenue, and think that you work in the shadows? Be reasonable.”

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“Tramp squares with rebellious treading!
Up heads! As proud peaks be seen!
In the second flood we are spreading
Every city on earth will be clean.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor

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“That was how I instructed you. Why did you not act as I ordered you? You were not empowered to kill anyone, to blind people or to destroy cities; but I gave you authority to do so.”

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To his general Sharrum-bani, Letter from Shu-Suen to Sharrum-bani about digging a trench http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3116.htm, Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Old Babylonian period, ca. 1800-1600 BCE, at The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature; their original date of composition and their historical accuracy are debated.

“If you go back a couple of hundred years to when the European cities really started to grow and peasants left the land to seek their future in the cities there was a saying that “city air makes you free” and the people who have come to London all races, creeds and colours have come for that. This is a city that you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you chose to do rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. That, I think, is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear that freedom, they fear a world in which the individual makes their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

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“Progress? There's no such thing as progress. There's only change. You dig a hole in the ground, you build up a city, and you fight a war, and you call it progress?”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

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“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”

Jonathan Lethem book The Fortress of Solitude

Source: The Fortress of Solitude

“My thoughts go immediately to the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the city of Mary, barbarously bombarded and destroyed.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

"Pope: Mariupol 'barbarously bombarded' https://www.jpost.com/christianworld/article-705634, implicitly criticizing Russia", The Jerusalem Post, 2 May 2022
2020s, 2022

“In a city [world] as dirty as this,
You gather up, save, and show me
Purely beautiful things.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

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“Never in a million years will you hear somebody on the radio say "I'm up for runnin' up on them crackers in city hall."”

Dave Chappelle (1973) American comedian

About Dead Prez
Film, Dave Chappelle's Block Party (2005)

“When you clean up a city, you destroy it.”

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Charles Bukowski 555

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