Quotes about city (2260 quotes, page 16)

“What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,… who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. …rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

People , Law , Drink , Passion

“How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.”

Toni Morrison book Jazz

Jazz (1991) Ch. 2

Love , People , Light , Time

“The victory of Christ gained us the kingdom of grace, the kingdom of heaven. Easter is the sky banner flag, the flag of eternity, the victory blowing over the gates of the Holy City of Jerusalem.”

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar

Excerpt from a sermon on Easter delivered by Mendel, found in Folia Mendeliana (1966), Volume 1-6, Moravian Museum in Brünn.
Sermon on Easter
Original: Der Sieg Christi hat uns das Reich der Gnade gewonnen, das Himmelreich. Osterfahne wird zur Himmelsfahne, zur Flagge der Ewigkeit, die siegreich weht über den Toren der Heiligen Stadt Jerusalem

Victory , Christ

“I personally object to the veil on aesthetic as well as other grounds; but I must admit that, for instance in the suburbs of American cities, I have often seen women attired more sloppily than our Persian women normally are.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 232
Publications, Mission for my Country (1961)

Women , Personality

“It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the saying has passed into common usage because the image has the ring of truth to it. Time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed (expletive) has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

The Undefended City https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/09/undefended-city-bill-whittle/, National Review (19 September 2008)
2000s

People , Truth , Time

“But they will give straight judgements to strangers and to the men of the land, and go not aside from what is just, their city flourishes, and the people prosper in it.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 225.

Men , People

“How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing?”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Page 169.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

World , Way

“The fiery lava in the hollow bosom of the earth, if it be restrained, in spite of its prison, bursts forth with greater force; then flows abroad, but, as it flows, subverts, beats down, and overthrows plains, mountains, forests, and cities.”

Pietro Metastasio Achille in Sciro

Del terreno nel concavo seno
Vasto incendio se bolle ristretto,
A dispetto del carcere indegno,
Con più sdegno gran strada si fa.
Fugge allora; ma, intanto che fugge,
Crolla, abbatte, sovverte, distrugge
Piani, monti, foreste e città.
Act III, scene 3.
Achille in Sciro (1736)

Mountain

“Upon completion of the centennial of your birth – and this time only – we have come to address some remarks at your graveside. We report to you, Rosh Betar, that Jerusalem, the city that has become bound together, the eternal capital of Israel and of the Land of Israel, shall not be subjected to any division and is our liberated and indivisible capital and so it shall remain from generation to generation.
The western part of the Land of Israel is entirely under our control and it shall not be partitioned anymore. No part of this land shall be given over to a foreign administration, to foreign sovereignty.
We believe that a day will come when the two parts of the Land of Israel shall establish, peacefully, in agreement and understanding a covenant of alliance, a free confederation, for the purpose of join cooperation”

Menachem Begin (1913–1992) Israeli politician and Prime Minister

Prime Minister Menachem Begin Speech At The Grave Of His Boss Ze’ev Jabotinsky http://www.jewocity.com/blog/prime-minister-menachem-begin-speech-at-the-grave-of-his-boss-zeev-jabotinsky-never-before-published/4566
For the New Year: Words at the Grave of Jabotinsky http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12196

Birth , Understanding , Time , Parting

“The nightmare of every government on earth is a million people assembled in the town square of your capital city, demanding that you pack up to Switzerland. no body can say No to a million people on the streets.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

History Ends in Green (1983)

People

“… the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Last Paragraph
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Men , Solitude , Memory , Time

“The letters Z, O and O dominate the front entrance gates of a capital city zoo. They are made of glass and they tower up two giraffes high. They are the width of one elephant and the colour of bottled blue ink.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

A Zed and Two Noughts

“To find the directions and quarters of the winds your method of procedure should be as follows. In the middle of the city place a marble amussium, laying it true by the level, or else let the spot be made so true by means of rule and level that no amussium is necessary. In the very center of that spot set up a bronze gnomon or "shadow tracker." At about the fifth hour in the morning, take the end of the shadow cast by this gnomon, and mark it with a point. Then, opening your compasses to this point which marks the length of the gnomon's shadow, describe a circle from the center. In the afternoon watch the shadow of your gnomon as it lengthens, and when it once more touches the circumference of this circle and the shadow in the afternoon is equal in length to that of the morning, mark it with a point. From these two points describe with your compasses intersecting arcs and through their intersection and the centre let a line be drawn to the circumference of the circle to give us the quarters of south and north…. and thus we have designed a figure equally apportioned among the eight winds.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 5-7

“On the other hand, some people say: “Who is this Chiz Escudero? So young, and living in just a humble townhouse in Quezon City. Who does he think he is to dream so boldly, to have such grand ambitions?!””

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

People , Dreams , Thinking

“Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state (1945), we tried the market (1997), then we tried them both together (2007) and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, The Profundity of Defeat http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/10/30/285/

War , Universe , Time , Country

“Because the Jews at Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from the city.”
Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis [sic, instead of ""tumultuantes""] Roma expulit.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis [sic, instead of "tumultuantes"] Roma expulit.
Chrestus may be a mis-spelling of Christus, Christ.
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Claudius, Ch. 25

“Look, I understand that for a lot of people, the US is superior to their country of residence in myriad ways, but I'm Australian. We have it all: the weather, the beautiful cities, the brand of football that involves neither padding yourself up like Santa Claus nor standing in a line in front of goal and covering your testicles.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

Great Writing interviewhttp://www.greatwriting.co.uk/content/view/1038/

People , Beauty , Way , Understanding

“If the authority of the National-Socialist Reich is to be upheld, then it is unacceptable that representatives of the Reich should be obliged to meet Jews when they enter or leave the house, and are in this way liable to infection with epidemics. I therefore intend to clear the city of Cracow, the seat of the Governor-General of the General Government, of Jews, as far as at all possible, by November 1, 1940. There will be a major operation to move the Jews, on the grounds that it is absolutely intolerable that thousands upon thousands of Jews should go slinking around and occupy apartments in the city which the Führer has granted the great honor of becoming the seat of a high Reich Authority…”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

April 12, 1940, from "Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews" - Page 197 - by Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, Abraham Margaliot, Lea Ben Dor, Steven T. Katz - 1999

Way , Housing

“Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
We have built a city of towers.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

“It is my belief that we have two responsibilities to pursue: Primarily, it is to get our house and garden, our place of living, in order, so that it supports us; Secondarily, it is to limit our population on earth, or we ourselves become the final plague. Both these duties are intimately connected, as stable regions create stable populations. If we do not get our cities, homes, and gardens in order, so that they feed and shelter us, we must lay waste to all other natural systems. Thus, truly responsible conservationists have gardens…”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 1.3

Home , Support , Nature , Housing

“I am going to give you for what it may be worth what I think are some of the qualifications a public administrator should have. I have tried to think of it in terms of personality, of training, of experience, and in none of those terms have I been able to discover what to me is a satisfactory answer. And no doubt the one thing that does satisfy my searching is susceptible of being termed as an oversimplification, but as I have looked about for administrators over a quarter of a century, I think I have discovered one thing that characterizes those that have been successful in many administrative positions of different types. It characterizes those that have been successful so far as their administrative work is concerned in the position of Presidents of the United States and Governors of states and Mayors of cities. It characterizes equally those that have been successful as the head of a finance department, the head of a unit of the health department, the head of a minor division in the police department, and the foreman of a garbage collecting gang. That is, to be a successful administrator one must have a catholic curiosity.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: "What Is an Administrator?" 1936, p. 6 ; As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 658

Health , Search , Thinking , Success

“The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" The Hand that Signed the Paper Felled a City http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=98", st. 1 (1936)

Death , Dead , Country

“Seattle sucks. New York and Chicago are real cities. Seattle is Dubuque, Iowa, putting on airs. People here think Seattle is Paris… it ain't. I've been to Paris, and this place isn't Paris.”

Dan Savage (1964) American sex advice columnist and gay rights campaigner

Interview on Zulkey.com, 28 March 2008

People , Thinking

“I feel the sense of possibilities
I feel the wrench of hard realities
The focus is sharp in the city
-- The Camera Eye (1981)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Feeling , Reality , Sense

“The mo-o-o-on, its huge cycloptic eye,
Watches the city streets contract, twist and cripple and crack.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, From Her to Eternity (1984), Saint Huck

“This is a national issue, one that is important when we talk about police legitimacy. This is an important national conversation we need to have. When something happens in Missouri or the streets of New York City, it has an impact here. We are all tied together.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

On controversial cases of police killing unarmed civilians — quoted in: [December 5, 2014, http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/government-and-politics/20141204/lapd-police-chief-charlie-beck-on-police-killings-this-is-an-important-national-conversation-we-need-to-have, LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck on police killings: ‘This is an important national conversation we need to have’, The Pasadena Star-News, December 4, 2014, Lauren Gold]

“That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the worlds tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry (1989), p.13

World , Lovers , Passion , Flying

“When the Amír heard these words, and knew what Jaipál would do in his despair, he thought the religion and the views of the faithful would best be consulted by peace, and the acquisition of tribute. So the Amír Mahmúd agreed with Subuktigín as to the propriety of withdrawing his hand of vengeance, on the condition of receiving at that time 1,000,000 dirhams of royal stamp, and some cities and forts in the middle of his country. Jaipál was to deliver these forts to the officers nominated by the Amír, and was to send hostages from among his relatives and friends to remain with the Amír until these conditions of cession were fulfilled. The Amír sent two deputies with Jaipal to see that he did not swerve from his engagements, and they were accompanied by confidential officers who were to receive charge of the ceded places.”

Sabuktigin (942–997) Founder of the Ghaznavid Empire

Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume II, p. 21. Translation of Tarikh-i-Yamini of al-Utbi.

Peace , Faith , Religion , Time

“I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), Chapter 10 (Ged)

Distant , Time

“Imagine that leader of all the enemy, in that great plain of Babylon, sitting on a sort of throne of smoking flame, a horrible and terrifying sight. Watch him calling together countless devils, to despatch them into different cities till the whole world is covered, forgetting no province or locality, no class or single individual.”

Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) Catholic Saint, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits)

No. 140-141.
Spiritual Exercises (1548)

World , Imagination , Forgetting

“My philosophy is I'm gonna fight as hard as I can to keep all the bad things from happening. But if they are gonna happen and I happen to be in the city where they are happening — like in the song, "California Earthquake" — then there's not much I can do about it. I can't uproot my whole life, just because I have a feeling that things may not work out all right. There's also always the chance that everything is going to be just swell, guys. Just hang in there. But I don't think it can happen on it's own.”

Cass Elliot (1941–1974) American singer

Rolling Stone interview (1968)

Life , Guy , Feeling , Thinking

“The last subject to which I am desirous to direct your attention as to a means of self-improvement, is that of philanthropic exertion for the good of others. I allude here more particularly to the efforts which you may be able to make for the benefit of those whose social position is inferior to your own. It is my deliberate conviction, founded on long and anxious consideration of the subject, that not only might great positive good be effected by an association of earnest young men, working together under judicious arrangements for this common end, but that its reflected advantages would overpay the toil of effort, and more than indemnify the cost of personal sacrifice. And how wide a field is now open before you! It would be unjust to pass over unnoticed the shining examples of virtues, that are found among tho poor and indigent There are dwellings so consecrated by patience, by self-denial, by filial piety, that it is not in the power of any physical deprivation to render them otherwise than happy. But sometimes in close contiguity with these, what a deep contrast of guilt and woe! On the darker features of the prospect we would not dwell, and that they are less prominent here than in larger cities we would with gratitude acknowledge; but we cannot shut our eyes to their existence. We cannot put out of sight that improvidence that never looks beyond the present hour; that insensibility that deadens the heart to the claims of duty and affection; or that recklessness which in the pursuit of some short-lived gratification, sets all regard for consequences aside. Evils such as these, although they may present themselves in any class of society, and under every variety of circumstances, are undoubtedly fostered by that ignorance to which the condition of poverty is most exposed; and of which it has been truly said, that it is the night of the spirit,—and a night without moon and without stars. It is to associated efforts for its removal, and for the raising of the physical condition of its subjects, that philanthropy must henceforth direct her regards. And is not such an object great 1 Are not such efforts personally elevating and ennobling? Would that some part of the youthful energy of this present assembly might thus expend itself in labours of benevolence! Would that we could all feel the deep weight and truth of the Divine sentiment that " No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, "Right Use of Leisure," cited in: James Hogg Titan Hogg's weekly instructor, (1847) p. 250; Also cited in: R. H. Hutton, " Professor Boole http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA153," (1866), p. 153
1840s

Men , Truth , Youth , Feeling

“If high stream of dreams and truth be told
and our intentions be entwined
then from these high flung tower walls
let healing grace and blessings fall
over all this cracked and broken land
from northern crag to southern down
from Universal Hall to Camden town
from city square to village green
from parliament to housing scheme
from Iona to the the Hill of Dreams
I sacrifice my power on the altar of your love
that it may be born again on another world.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

"Universal Hall" (co-written with Steve Wickham)
Universal Hall (2003)

Love , Truth , World , Dreams

“New York is like my dream city. That's where I'm going to live, I'm convinced of it.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

" High School Musical Starring Frances Bean Cobain http://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/red-carpet-dresses/a235/frances-bean-cobain-0308/" (2008)

Dreams

“One a child, one old / almost half a century apart // both / need my hand in this city”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

“We go down with the bells ringing in all the sunken cities.
Forgotten, we are greeted by the embassies of the dead,
While your endless flowing carries us on and on;
And neither is nor was. The moment only, eternal.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Rivers" (1980), trans. Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Dead

“New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

My Works and Days (1979)

Perfection

“The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

People , Mountain , Universe , Heart

“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

After the devastation of Dresden by aerial bombing, and the resulting fire storm (February 1945). Quoted in Where the Right Went Wrong (2004) by Patrick J Buchanan, p. 119 ISBN 0312341156
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Question

“There have been two or three meetings held in the City of London… attended by the same class of people, but not ending up with a resolution promising to pay. On the contrary, we are spending the money, but they won't pay. What has happened since to alter their tone? Simply that we have sent in the bill. We started our four Dreadnoughts. They cost eight millions of money. We promised them four more; they cost another eight millions. Somebody has got to pay, and then these gentlemen say: "Perfectly true; somebody has got to pay, but we would rather that somebody were somebody else". We started building; we wanted money to pay for the building; so we sent the hat round. We sent it round amongst workmen, and the miners and weavers of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and the Scotchmen of Dumfries, who, like all their countrymen, know the value of money, they all dropped in their coppers. We went round Belgravia, and there has been such a howl ever since that it has well-nigh deafened us.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 144.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Money , People

“January-February 1680: ‘The grand temple in front of the Maharana’s mansion (at Udaipur) – one of the wonderful buildings of the age, which had cost the infidels much money – was destroyed and its images broken.’ ‘On 24 January the Emperor went to view the lake Udaisagar and ordered all the three temples on its banks to be pulled down.’ ‘On 29 January Hasan Ali Khan reported that 172 other temples in the environs of Udaipur had been demolished.’ ‘On 22 February the Emperor went to look at Chitor, and by his order the 63 temples of the place were destroyed.’
10 August 1680: ‘Abu Turab returned to Court and reported that he had pulled down 66 temples in Amber’. 2 August 1680: ‘Temple of Someshwar in western Mewar ordered to be destroyed.’
September 1687: ‘On the capture of Golkonda, the Emperor appointed Abdur Rahim Khan as Censor of the city of Haidarabad with orders to put down infidel practices and (heretical) innovations and destroy the temples and build mosques on their sites.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Akhbarat. Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1972 reprint, pp. 185–89., quoted from Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1680s

Money , Age

“For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life. For instance, I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now: the same broken, straggling country, cultivated and wild, the same roads, farmhouses, and ravines. I used to climb up there in the evening as if I too were fleeing the nightly shock of the air-raid alarms.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Incipit
The house on the hill (1949)

Life , Way , Time , Sea

“And once again the scene was chang’d,
New earth there seem’d to be,
I saw the Holy City
Beside the tideless sea;
The light of God was on its streets,
The gates were open wide,
And all who would might enter,
And no one was denied.
No need of moon or stars by night,
Or sun to shine by day,
It was the new Jerusalem,
That would not pass away.”

Fred Weatherly (1848–1929) English lawyer, author, lyricist and broadcaster

Song The Holy City http://www.biblestudycharts.com/SH_The_Holy_City.html

God , Star , Light , Sun

“They tell us we must be prepared to contemplate, in fact to welcome, the alteration and alienation of our towns and cities. They tell us there is no such thing as our own people and our country. Indeed there is, and I say it in no mean or arrogant or exclusive spirit. What I know is that we have an identity of our own, as we have a territory of our own, and that the instinct to preserve that identity, as to defend that territory, is one of the deepest and strongest implanted in mankind. I happen also to believe that the instinct is good and that its beneficent effects are not exhausted. … In our time that identity has been threatened more than once. In the past it was threatened by violence and aggression from without. It is now threatened from within by the foreseeable consequences of a massive but unpremeditated and fortunately, in substantial measure, reversible immigration.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech in Wolverhampton (8 June 1969), quoted in The Times (9 June 1969), p. 3

People , Time , Past , Country

“The true Negro does not want integration… He realizes his potential is far better among his own race… It will destroy our race eventually… In one northern city, a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife… It boils down to whether we are going to take God's Word as final.”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

Quoted in "The Nation's Best Bible College Gets Low Grades on Racial Diversity" The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, vol. 31 (2001), pp.43-45

God

“Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
History of Madness (1961)

World , Departure , Madness

“Most Australians did not love a sunburnt country. Farmers preferred a reliable rainfall; bank managers and city merchants preferred to deal with customers living in towns where the economy did not suffer from drought. The governors, who came from the British Isles, still retreated in summer to the cool hill towns - to Sutton Forest and Mount Macedon and the Mount Lofty Ranges and other colonial Simlas.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia (2016)

Love , Suffering , Summer , Country

“Mahmood having reached Tahnesur before the Hindoos had time to take measures for its defence, the city was plundered, the idols broken, and the idol Jugsom was sent to Ghizny to be trodden under foot…Mahmood having refreshed his troops, and understanding that at some distance stood the rich city of Mutra [Mathura], consecrated to Krishn-Vasdew, whom the Hindoos venerate as an emanation of God, directed his march thither and entering it with little opposition from the troops of the Raja of Delhy, to whom it belonged, gave it up to plunder. He broke down or burned all the idols, and amassed a vast quantity of gold and silver, of which the idols were mostly composed. He would have destroyed the temples also, but he found the labour would have been excessive; while some say that he was averted from his purpose by their admirable beauty. He certainly extravagantly extolled the magnificence of the buildings and city in a letter to the governor of Ghizny, in which the following passage occurs: "There are here a thousand edifices as firm as the faith of the faithful; most of them of marble, besides innumerable temples; nor is it likely that this city has attained its present condition but at the expense of many millions of deenars, nor could such another be constructed under a period of two centuries."…The King tarried in Mutra 20 days; in which time the city suffered greatly from fire, beside the damage it sustained by being pillaged. At length he continued his march along the course of a stream on whose banks were seven strong fortifications, all of which fell in succession: there were also discovered some very ancient temples, which, according to the Hindoos, had existed for 4000 years. Having sacked these temples and forts, the troops were led against the fort of Munj…The King, on his return, ordered a magnificent mosque to be built of marble and granite, of such beauty as struck every beholder with astonishment, and furnished it with rich carpets, and with candelabras and other ornaments of silver and gold. This mosque was universally known by the name of the Celestial Bride. In its neighbourhood the King founded an university, supplied with a vast collection of curious books in various languages. It contained also a museum of natural curiosities. For the maintenance of this establishment he appropriated a large sum of money, besides a sufficient fund for the maintenance of the students, and proper persons to instruct youth in the arts and sciences…The King, in the year AH 410 (AD 1019), caused an account of his exploits to be written and sent to the Caliph, who ordered it to be read to the people of Bagdad, making a great festival upon the occasion, expressive of his joy at the propagation of the faith.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, pp. 27-37.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Money , God , People , Books

“Out of the beliefs nourished by the agrarian myth there had arisen the notion that the city was a parasitical growth on the country. Bryan spoke for a people raised for generations on the idea that the farmer was a very special creature, blessed by God, and that in a country consisting largely of farmers the voice of the farmer was the voice of democracy and of virtue itself. The agrarian myth encouraged farmers to believe that they were not themselves an organic part of the whole order of business enterprise and speculation that flourished in the city, partaking of its character and sharing in its risks, but rather the innocent pastoral victims of a conspiracy hatched in the distance. The notion of an innocent and victimized populace colors the whole history of agrarian controversy, and indeed the whole history of the populistic mind.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter I, part I, p. 35

God , People , Color , Democracy

“He would rather burst a city gate than find it open to admit him.”
Non tam portas intrare patentis quam fregisse juvat.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book II, line 443 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

“The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.”

H. G. Wells book The World Set Free

The World Set Free

Men , Business , Past

“I became a member of the Party in January, 1933, in the heat of battle. At the time, I was serving as defense attorney for Angelo Herndon in Atlanta, Georgia, where Herndon, an eighteen-year-old Negro youth, had been framed on a charge of inciting to insurrection…. Of what was Herndon "guilty"? He had led a demonstration of unemployed Negro and white workers to City Hall, had been found with a couple of Communist pamphlets in his possession, and possessed a firm and inspiringly defiant advocacy of the freedom of Negroes and of the liberation of the white masses from exploitation. The "dangerous" policy he then espoused as a Communist, was the unity of the Negroes in the South with the impoverished white workers and poor farmers.”

Benjamin J. Davis Jr. (1903–1964) American politician

"Why I am a Communist" (1947)

Youth , Freedom , Time

“A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 a. m. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Caen, Herb. "A city is like San Francisco, not a faceless 'burb" http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/A-city-is-like-San-Francisco-not-a-faceless-burb-3168435.php S.F. Gate, 2010.
Attributed

Justice , Girl , Flowers , Fish

“We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

As quoted in ExpressIndia (7 September 2005) http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=54191

“Almost all medieval Muslim historians credit their heroes with desecration of Hindu idols and/or destruction of Hindu temples. The picture that emerges has the following components, depending upon whether the iconoclast was in a hurry on account of Hindu resistance or did his work at leisure after a decisive victory:
1. The idols were mutilated or smashed or burnt or melted down if they were made of precious metals.
2. Sculptures in relief on walls and pillars were disfigured or scraped away or torn down.
3. Idols of stone and inferior metals or their pieces were taken away, sometimes by cartloads, to be thrown down before the main mosque in (a) the metropolis of the ruling Muslim sultan and (b) the holy cities of Islam, particularly Mecca, Medina and Baghdad.
4. There were instances of idols being turned into lavatory seats or handed over to butchers to be used as weights while selling meat.
5. Brahmin priests and other holy men in and around the temple were molested or murdered.
6. Sacred vessels and scriptures used in worship were defiled and scattered or burnt.
7. Temples were damaged or despoiled or demolished or burnt down or converted into mosques with some structural alterations or entire mosques were raised on the same sites mostly with temple materials.
8. Cows were slaughtered on the temple sites so that Hindus could not use them again.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Men , Decision , Victory , Dependency

“Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Pain , Suffering

“The German air offensives against British cities in World Wars I and II not only failed to coerce the United Kingdom to surrender, but Germany also lost both wars.”

John Mearsheimer book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

Source: The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), Chapter 4, The Primacy of Land Power, p. 99

War , World

“The British have been particularly shy about the issues of financial regulation, and attentive only to the interests of the City – hence their reluctance to see the introduction of a tax on financial transactions and tax harmonisation in Europe.”

François Hollande (1954) 24th President of the French Republic

As quoted in "New French leader fires a broadside at Britain: You only care about the City of London, says President Hollande" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2141040/Francois-Hollande-French-president-says-Britain-cares-City.html (8 May 2012), Daily Mail.

“My theory was that a city without a newspaper is a city without a soul.”

Luis A. Ferré (1904–2003) American politician

On acquiring El Día, now the largest newspaper by circulation in Puerto Rico, as quoted by the Associated Press http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2003/Ex-Puerto-Rican-Governor-Ferre-Dies-at-99/id-8cb93046108ad2da5ed0958cda645bfb.

Soul

“From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races. Mahmoud Ghazni was an early example of Muslim ruthlessness, burning in 1018 of the temples of Mathura, razing Kanauj to the ground and destroying the famous temple of Somnath, sacred to all Hindus. His successors were as ruthless as Ghazni: 103 temples in the holy city of Benaras were razed to the ground, its marvelous temples destroyed, its magnificent palaces wrecked.”

Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) French historian, musicologist, Indologist and expert on Shaivite Hinduism

Alain Danielou: Histoire de l' Inde

God , War , Faith , History

“Let the person who wins be him who says what is most desirable for the city.”

Cratinus Dionysalexandros

Dionysalexandros (i.e. Dionysus in the part of Paris)

Personality

“Ceres also should be outside the city in a place to which people need never go except for the purpose of sacrifice.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VII, Sec. 2

People

“At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries is, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
History of Madness (1961)

Age , World , Disease , Communication

“Inside this complex labyrinth of roads lives a great part of the city's population, whose existence is ignored by the government, despite it still demands abusive taxes from it. Taxes which are used in magnificent and useless buildings elsewhere in Rio de Janeiro.”

Lima Barreto book Clara dos Anjos

Clara dos Anjos (1948)

Parting

“In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 13, The Financial Services Industries, p. 467

Life , Sense , Tree

“This State, this city, this campus, have stood long for both human rights and human enlightenment — and let that forever be true. This Nation is now engaged in a continuing debate about the rights of a portion of its citizens. This Nation is now engaged in a continuing debate about the rights of a portion of its citizens. That will go on, and those rights will expand until the standard first forged by the Nation's founders has been reached, and all Americans enjoy equal opportunity and liberty under law. But this Nation was not founded solely on the principle of citizens' rights. Equally important, though too often not discussed, is the citizen's responsibility. For our privileges can be no greater than our obligations. The protection of our rights can endure no longer than the performance of our responsibilities. Each can be neglected only at the peril of the other. I speak to you today, therefore, not of your rights as Americans, but of your responsibilities. They are many in number and different in nature. They do not rest with equal weight upon the shoulders of all. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of responsibility. All Americans must be responsible citizens, but some must be more responsible than others, by virtue of their public or their private position, their role in the family or community, their prospects for the future, or their legacy from the past. Increased responsibility goes with increased ability, for "of those to whom much is given, much is required."”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

Family , Law , Communication , Nature

“""… Why Nimrod? Why that name?""
Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. ""I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: 'And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth… And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-""
""Babel?""
""It was only generations after the flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4. 'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.'""
""But God struck them down when they built the tower.""
""Yes. But why? 11, 6. 'Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.' That's what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. 'Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'""
""Wow,"" Thandie said. ""You're challenging God?""
""Why the hell not?""”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Flood (2008), Chapter 90

God , Fear , School , Imagination

“This occasion is dedicated to freedom. The people of Baltimore, and of Maryland, are gathered here in that spirit. Because Americans cherish that sentiment they cherish the name of Lafayette. On the anniversary of his birth, we are gathered about his statue in this proud city which we know he loved, almost in the shadow of the stately monument reared to his great friend Washington, to rededicate ourselves to the inspiring memory of a true son of world freedom.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

Love , People , World , Birth

“To be sure. Our throats and stomachs are lined with solid gold, and we find the thistles nourishing and good to eat. As a matter of fact, there is nothing else in our country that is fit for food. All around the City of Thi grow countless thistles, and all we need do is to go and gather them. If we wanted anything else to eat, we would have to plant it, and grow it, and harvest it, and that would be a lot of trouble and make us work, which is an occupation we detest.”

L. Frank Baum book The Lost Princess of Oz

The Lost Princess of Oz, Ch. 9 : The High Coco-Lorum of Thi
Later Oz novels

Food , Country

“Failing to divide its social chromosomes and split up into new cells, each bearing some portion of the original inheritance, the city continues to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously, by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Here the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names, like Manhattanville and Harlem in New York; there it has, more happily, left the organs of local government and the vestiges of an independent life, even assisted their revival, as in Chelsea and Kensington in London; but it has nevertheless enveloped those areas in its physical organization and built up the open land that once served to ensure their identity and integrity.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

Sprawling Giantism
The City in History (1961)

Life

“Are we like the God of the Old Testament, that we in Washington can decide which cities, towns, and hamlets in Vietnam will be destroyed? Do we have to accept that? I don't think we do. I think we can do something about it.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

About the Vietnam War, in his last speech at the Senate on the subject

God , Thinking

“Of course most people underestimate the warrior characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples anyway. It takes a heap of piety to keep a Viking from wanting to go sack a city.”

Jerry Pournelle (1933–2017) American science fiction writer and journalist

Reply to reader email http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail141.html#competent2 in Chaos Manor Mail 141, February 19-25, 2001
Assorted

People

“In point of material wealth and resources, we are greatly in advance of them. The taxable property of the Confederate States cannot be less than twenty-two hundred millions of dollars! This, I think I venture but little in saying, may be considered as five times more than the colonies possessed at the time they achieved their independence. Georgia, alone, possessed last year, according to the report of our comptroller-general, six hundred and seventy-two millions of taxable property. The debts of the seven confederate States sum up in the aggregate less than eighteen millions, while the existing debts of the other of the late United States sum up in the aggregate the enormous amount of one hundred and seventy-four millions of dollars. This is without taking into account the heavy city debts, corporation debts, and railroad debts, which press, and will continue to press, as a heavy incubus upon the resources of those States. These debts, added to others, make a sum total not much under five hundred millions of dollars. With such an area of territory as we have-with such an amount of population-with a climate and soil unsurpassed by any on the face of the earth-with such resources already at our command-with productions which control the commerce of the world-who can entertain any apprehensions as to our ability to succeed, whether others join us or not?”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

World , Thinking , Time , Wealth

“…The fortress of Badalgarh, which lies below the fortress of Gwaliar, a very lofty structure, was taken from Rai Man Singh and fell into the hands of the Muslims, and a brazen animal which was worshipped by the Hindus also fell into their hands, and was sent by them to Agra, whence it was sent by Sultan Ibrahim to Dihli, and was put over the city gate. The image was removed to Fathpur in the year AH 992 (AD 1584), ten years before the composition of this history, where it was seen by the author of this work. It was converted into gongs, and bells, and implements of all kinds.”

`Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni book Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

Sultan Ibrahim Lodi (AD 1517-1526) Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh)
Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

History , Animals

“Every man who labored for the rebellion in the field, who murdered Union prisoners by cruelty and starvation, who conspired to bring about civil war in the loyal states, who invented dangerous compounds to burn steamboats and northern cities,, who contrived hellish schemes to introduce into northern cities the wasting pestilence of yellow fever, calls himself a Democrat. Every dishonest contractor who has been convicted of defrauding the government, every dishonest paymaster or disbursing officer who has been convicted of squandering the public money at the gaming table or in gold gambling operations, every officer in the army who was dismissed fur cowardice or disloyalty, calls himself a Democrat.”

Oliver P. Morton (1823–1877) American politician

Arraignment of the Democratic Party (June 1866)

Money , War , Game

“But it is one thing to keep your adversaries or your "near-peer" competitors off balance with strategic unpredictability and quite another to keep the American people themselves similarly at a loss as to what exactly is going on, which is now a daily occurrence, to say nothing at all about the vexation on the part of many of our traditional allies all over the world. I began writing this book after returning from a trip to Mexico City on a one-senator diplomatic mission to calm and reassure the nation to our south- a vitally important friend and trading partner- that all will be well, that America is still America. But is it?”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Source: Conscience of a Conservative (2017), p. 6

People , Books , World , Loss

“That prudent Hero's wandering, Muse, rehearse,
Who (Troy b'ing sack'd) coasting the Universe,
Saw many Cities, and their various Modes;
Much suffering, tost by Storms on raging Floods,
His Friends conducting to their Native Coast:
But all in vain, for he his Navy lost,
And they their Lives, prophanely feasting on
Herds consecrated to the glorious Sun;
Who much incens'd obstructed so their way,
They ne'er return'd: Jove's Daughter this display.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Book I, opening lines
Homer His Odysses Translated (1665)

Way , Suffering , Universe , Rage

“It will go on as we engage with the city of Ferguson – and surrounding municipalities – to reform their law enforcement practices and establish a public safety effort that protects and serves all members of the community. It will go on as we broaden this work, and extend the assistance of the Justice Department to other communities around the country. And it will go on as we join together with all Americans to ensure that public safety is not a burden undertaken by the brave few, but a positive collaboration between everyone in this nation. The report we have issued and the steps we have taken are only the beginning of a necessarily resource intensive and inclusive process to promote reconciliation, to reduce and eliminate bias, and to bridge gaps and build understanding. And in the days ahead, the Department of Justice will stay true to my promise, vigilant in its execution, and determined in the pursuit of justice—in every case, in every circumstance, and in every community across the United States. Thank you.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Justice , Law , Communication , Understanding

“Now he saw the problem with great clarity. If he lived here, life would be pleasant and safe. But it would also be predictable. A child could be born here, grow up here, die here, without ever experiencing the excitement of discovery. Why did Dona question him endlessly about his life in the burrow and his journey to the country of the ants? Because for her, it represented a world that was dangerous and full of fascinating possibilities. For the children of this underground city, life was a matter of repetition, of habit. And this, he suddenly realized, was the heart of the problem. Habit. Habit was a stifling, warm blanket that threatened you with suffocation and lulled the mind into a state of perpetual nagging dissatisfaction. Habit meant the inability to escape from yourself, to change and develop…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), pp. 132-133

Life , Children , World , Question

“You [ Katherine Sophie Dreier; director of the Art Center in New York City; she co-founded with Duchamp and Man Ray the 'Sociéte Anonyme' in Manhattan in 1920] must understand:
My attitude toward the book is based upon my attitude towards 'Art' since 1918 – so I am furious myself that you will accept only partly that attitude [in a new publication by Katherine Dreier]. It can be no more question of my life as an artist’s life: [because] I gave it up ten years ago; this period is long enough to prove that my intention to remain outside of any art manifestation is permanent... The third question is that I want to be alone as much as possible.
This abrupt way to speak of my 'hardening process' is not meant to be mean, but is the result of '42 years of age'....10 000 apologies for this rough letter and affectueusement
Dee”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from a letter to Katherine Sophie Dreier, Paris 11 September 1929; as cted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 158
Duchamp's quote is referring to a new publication of the 'Duchamp Book' and to his famous so-called Art-Silence.
1921 - 1950

Life , Books , Age , Art

“Imagine!, the two most important Sahabah in Islam, racing to help an old blind woman, at night and at the edge of the city!.”

Mohammed Alkobaisi (1970) Iraqi Islamic scholar

Understanding Islam, "Morals and Ethics" http://vod.dmi.ae/media/96716/Ep_03_Morals_and_Ethics Dubai Media

Imagination , Help , Night

“The successful public administrator is curious about everything. Perhaps you don't see just why it is that a public administrator should go about continually asking questions of everything and everybody about him. Well, let us take one functional phase of public administration in a municipal government.
One of the best administrators that I ever knew had a great curiosity about garbage. He was the head of the refuse disposal department of the District of Columbia. He asked all sorts of questions of the garbage cans and the ash cans and trash barrels, because in that city we imposed upon the householders a three way system of refuse removal. You couldn't put your trash and your garbage and your ashes all in one container, you had to have three containers, and also, at that particular time, the collectors were divided into three different crews. So this man with this curiosity made a study of what he found in the rubbish cans, and the results. If that study were plotted on a map, and as the result of the study of that map the routings were rearranged, the whole system of garbage collection was rearranged; not only of collection, but of disposal.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: "What Is an Administrator?" 1936, p. 6-7; As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 658

Way , Question , Study , Time

“What a city, what a night, what a crowd, what a bomb, what a mistake, what a wanker you have for a President.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

Acceptance speech at the MTV Europe Music Awards, referring to French nuclear testing in Pacific (1995)

Night

“I sing of warfare and a man at war.
From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
He came to Italy by destiny,
To our Lavinian western shore,
A fugitive, this captain, buffeted
Cruelly on land as on the sea
By blows from powers of the air—behind them
Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage.
And cruel losses were his lot in war,
Till he could found a city and bring home
His gods to Latium, land of the Latin race,
The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome.
Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled
In her divine pride, and how sore at heart
From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him—
A man apart, devoted to his mission—
To undergo so many perilous days
And enter on so many trials. Can anger
Black as this prey on the minds of heaven?”

Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) American poet, critic and translator

opening lines
The Aeneid (1983)

God , War , Home , Rage

“Indeed, we can find no more instructive lesson on the whole question of suffrage than the history of its development in the British empire. For more than four centuries, royal prerogative and the rights of the people of England have waged perpetual warfare. Often the result has appeared doubtful, often the people have been driven to the wall, but they have always renewed the struggle with unfaltering courage. Often have they lost the battle, but they have always won the campaign. Amidst all their reverses, each generation has found them stronger, each half-century has brought them its year of jubilee, and has added strength to the bulwark of law and breadth to the basis of liberty. This contest has illustrated again and again the saying that 'eternal vigilance is the price of liberty'. The growth of a city, the decay of a borough, the establishment of a new manufacture, the enlargement of commerce, the recognition of a new power, have, each in its turn, added new and peculiar elements to the contest. Hallam says: 'It would be difficult, probably, to name any town of the least consideration in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which did not, at some time or other, return members to Parliament. This is so much the case, that if, in running our eyes along the map, we find any seaport, as Sunderland or Falmouth, or any inland town, as Leeds or Birmingham, which has never enjoyed the elective franchise, we may conclude at once that it has emerged from obscurity since the reign of Henry VIII.'”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

Constitutional History of England, Chap. XIII
1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

People , Law , History , Courage

“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in the House of Commons, November 5, 1919 as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 355 ISBN 1586486381
Early career years (1898–1929)

Way , Water

“NRA members are in city hall, Fort Carson, NORAD, the Air Force Academy and the Olympic Training Center. And yes, NRA members are surely among the police and fire and SWAT team heroes who risked their lives to rescue the students at Columbine. "Don't come here"? We're already here. This community is our home. Every community in America is our home.”

Charlton Heston (1923–2008) American actor

NRA annual meeting opening remarks http://www.nrawinningteam.com/meeting99/hestsp1.html, Denver, Colorado, 1999-05-01
Mayor Webb asked the NRA not to hold this meeting, which fell shortly after the Columbine High School massacre on 1999-04-20.
In

Home , Communication , Training

“The first-known public lottery was sponsored by Augustus Caesar to raise funds for repairing the city of Rome; the first public lottery awarding money prizes, the Lotto de Firenze, was established in Florence in 1530.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Four, Coins, Wheels, And Oddments, p. 119

Money

“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

Press conference (8 July 2005)

Life , People , World , Fear

“I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries — how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to J. Edward Austen (1816-12-16) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Nature , Tree , Joy

“Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.”

Carl Sandburg Chicago

"Chicago" (1916)

World

“I have a friend, he's a very, very substantial guy. He loves the city of lights, he loves Paris. For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris, was automatic with his wife and his family. Hadn't seen him in a while and I said, Jim, let me ask you a question, how's Paris doing? "Paris? I don't go there anymore, Paris is no longer Paris."”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Trump speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference http://time.com/4682023/cpac-donald-trump-speech-transcript/ (24 February 2017)
2010s, 2017, February

Love , Family , Guy , Question

“Well now everything dies baby that's a fact,
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty,
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Atlantic City"
Song lyrics, Nebraska (1982)

Baby

“Had my lineage and rank been accompanied by only moderate success, I should have come to this city as friend rather than prisoner, and you would not have disdained to ally yourself peacefully with one so nobly born, the ruler of so many nations.”
Si quanta nobilitas et fortuna mihi fuit, tanta rerum prosperarum moderatio fuisset, amicus potius in hanc urbem quam captus venissem, neque dedignatus esses claris maioribus ortum, plurimis gentibus imperitantem foedere in pacem accipere.

Caratacus (15–54) British chieftain of the Catuvellauni tribe

Tacitus Annales, Bk. XII, ch. 37; translation from The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1956] 1971) p. 267.

Success

“Through me is the way to the city of woe.
Through me is the way to sorrow eternal.
Through me is the way to the lost below.”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Canto III, lines 1–3
Translations, Inferno (2008)

Way

“Rome has an ambiance, puerile yet unmatchable. Rome hints at the possibility of becoming the main actor in the drama of one’s own life. (The hint is false, of course; but the stolid northern cities do not even possess the hint.)”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

Source: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 2 (pp. 19-20)

Life , Falseness

“I also think that there's a way to go about things, and there's a way to do things. And I think the issue at hand needs to be addressed internally, and before we move on, because from personal experience, you know, you are living in the hood, living in the inner city, you deal with things, you deal with people dying.”

Richard Sherman (American football) (1988) American football player

Press conference (16 September 2015), as quoted in "Video: Richard Sherman speaks passionately on Black Lives Matter" https://web.archive.org/web/20150917000340/http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/seahawks/video-richard-sherman-speaks-passionately-on-black-lives-matter/ (16 September 2015), by Bob Condotta, The Seattle Times, Seattle, Washington
Press conference (16 September 2015)

People , Way , Thinking , Personality

“San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

American Notes— At the Golden Gate http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/AmericanNotes/goldengate.html (1891).
Other works

Women , People , Beauty , Parting

“I know that the world I converse with in the city and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall know the value and law of this discrepance. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience

World , Law , Thinking

“In October 1945 I returned from America, where I had stayed during the war. I arrived in Le Havre, full of ruins, a carcass of a city. It took one night to reach Paris on a train with no windows. That night I got the idea for the monument. I sketched it on paper and forgot about it, until I visited Rotterdam for the first time in 1947. I saw a city without a heart. I saw a crater in the body of a city. And I remembered that night, the sketches. I made a small terracotta model and sent it to an exhibition of French art in Germany.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from interview in 'Het Vrije Volk', (Dutch newspaper), 4 July 1950; as cited in 'Unveiling of the Dutch City https://www.wederopbouwrotterdam.nl/en/tijdlijn/unveiling-of-the-destroyed-city/
Ossip Zadkine explained in 1950 the genesis of his large bronze sculpture 'Destroyed City', commissioned by the city Rotterdam
1940 - 1960

War , Art , Idea , Time

Quotes about city page 16

Quotes about city
page 16