American Cities Quotes & Sayings

Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous. — Lyndon B. Johnson

True home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; — William Gibson

In a moment when young black voters were key to the election and the reelection of a black president, when the Department of Justice has been led these years by the first two African-American attorneys general, when many big cities boast African-American league prosecutors and police chiefs and mayors, even in this moment, why is it that it still feels to so many young people that there is more power for change on the court than in the courts? — Melissa Harris-Perry

When understanding fails, there is always more force in reserve. As the "experiments in material and human resources control" collapse and "revolutionary development" grinds to a halt, we simply resort more openly to the Gestapo tactics that are barely concealed behind the facade of pacification. When American cities explode, we can expect the same. The technique of "limited warfare" translates neatly into a system of domestic repression - far more humane, as will quickly be explained, than massacring those who are unwilling to wait for the inevitable victory of the war on poverty. Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seem all to plain. — Noam Chomsky

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. — William Gibson

The real illness of the American city today, and especially of the deprived groups within it, is voicelessness. — John Henry Cox

Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people. I'm supremely confident that Bostonians will pull together, take care of each other, and move forward as one proud city. And as they do, the American people will be with them every single step of the way. — Barack Obama

The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche. — Martin Scorsese

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.
Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies. — Jane Jacobs

A natural disaster in one American city is a natural disaster in every American city, including Fresno and, for that matter, every city and small town in the San Joaquin Valley, — Alan Autry

The American School of Paris is one of those strange places in foreign cities where expatriates huddle together in a defensive circle and try to pretend they're still back at home.
I saw it as a place for lost souls. — Amy Plum

The need for a garden of rare palms and vines and ornamental trees and shrubs which would be near enough to a growing city to form a quiet place where children with their elders could peer, as it were, into those fascinating jungles and palm glades of the tropics which have for generations stimulated the imaginations of American youth. — David Fairchild

I love the fact that a lot of my audience is people from the inner city. African-Americans love my films. — Wes Craven

Michigan is very racially separated and the city of Detroit itself is 84 percent African-American and the surrounding suburbs are 86 percent White. — Kwame Kilpatrick

Well, first of all the Dominion Bureau of Statistics made a survey in the spring of 1970, which showed that on balance the difference in the cost of living between Canadian cities and American cities was 5 % to the advantage, of course, to the Canadian cities. — Leonard Woodcock

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. — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

Get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I've jotted down a few of them. Objects create happiness. The animals are pleased to be of use. Your cities will shine forever. Death will not touch you. — Jenny Offill

Curitiba is not a paradise. We have all the problems that most Latin American cities have. We have slums. We have the same difficulties, but the big difference is the respect given by people due to the quality of the services which are provided. — Jaime Lerner

Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all big American cities, but which reaches its ultimate in New York. — Fritz Leiber

I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. — Jack Kerouac

The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness — J. Rufus Fears

The notion of a defense that will protect American cities is one that will not be achieved, but it is that goal that supplies the political magic, as it were, in the president's vision. — James R. Schlesinger

Fresno Bulldogs: This gang is one of the few California Hispanic gangs not to claim allegiance to the Surenos or Nortenos. Latin Kings: This Chicago-based group consists of more than 160 cliques in 30 states and has as many as 35,000 members. Mara Salvatrucha (or M.S. 13): This violent Hispanic organization has origins in El Salvador. It has roughly 8,000 members in the United States and another 20,000 outside the United States. Bloods: With its roots in Los Angeles, this African American street gang exists in 123 cities and 33 states. Crips: Also founded in Los Angeles, this African American gang exists in 40 states and has 30,000 to 35,000 members. Gangster Disciples: This Chicago-based African American gang is active in at least 31 states and has more than 25,000 members. Vice Lord Nation: This Chicago-based African American gang has around 30,000 members in 28 states. — Steven Briggs

Rome is the city above all cities which loses most of its meaning to those who do not bring to it some historical sense, a decent knowledge of art, and a good amount of time. Rome therefore is particularly disturbing to an American. — Clare Boothe Luce

What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export. — David Simon

The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago. — Timothy Noah

Peace and love no longer held dominion in San Francisco, Gaskin decided. "The information we got in San Francisco was that folks were buying into violence in a wholesale lot," he said in explaining his flock's mass departure. His apocalyptic vision extended to American cities in general. They were falling into brutishness and depravity. And the only solution, according to Gaskin, was to withdraw from their destructive vortex and lead a simple, communal life in the country. — David Talbot

In the 19th century, Berlin was called the German Chicago. Or Chicago was called the American Berlin because they were sort of new cities or new powerhouses. — Darryl Pinckney

Up until now, I believed the nuclear threat to the U.S. from Iran was limited to the ability of terrorists to penetrate the borders or port security to deliver a device to a major city ... While that threat should continue to be a grave concern for every American, these tests by Iran demonstrate just how devious the fanatical mullahs in Tehran are. We are facing a clever and unscrupulous adversary in Iran that could bring America to its knees. — Joseph Farah

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash
all of them
surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. — John Steinbeck

[Chicago] is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other superlatives, but it is a "world" city, more European in some respects than American. — John Gunther

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry. — Daniel J. Boorstin

For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which
we are told
a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome. — Lawrence Osborne

Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough. — Darin Strauss

This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America. This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people. — Mitt Romney

Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that. — Darren Walker

Many Europeans, while admiring the strength and power of the American economy, undoubtedly feel that the system of social values which prevails in the United States, manifested in the acute problems evident in the inner cities and the level of violent crime, for example, leaves much to be desired. — Paul Ormerod

The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work. — Michelle Alexander

It is a cultural tradition that makes New Orleans what it is. It also represents the roots of American music and an important part of the African-American community in New Orleans. It unites people in some of the poorer neighborhoods of the city. It is absolutely critical to continue. — Bill Taylor

China's ability to deliver nuclear warheads on American cities is expanding. — Lee H. Hamilton

The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today - Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia - even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten. — Simon Winchester

It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way. — Laurence Tribe

You know, all this is speculating. I don't think any of us really know what's going on. I think there's always that pendulum action in American politics, and I expect Nixon to run into trouble in the next few years. I think there's going to be disillusionment over his war settlement. I think the economic problems are not going to get better and the problems in the great cities are going to worsen, and it may be that by '76 somebody can come along and win on a kind of platform that I was running on in '72. — Hunter S. Thompson

American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all. — William J. Mitchell

There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism. — Dan Simmons

Fifty-thousand were gathered (March,27th,1933) in and around Madison Square Garden, supportive rallies were at that moment waiting in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and about seven other American cities. At each supportive rally, thousands huddled around loudspeakers waiting for the Garden event, which would be broadcast live via radio to 200 additional cities across the country. At least 1 million Jews were participating nationwide. Perhaps another million Americans of non-Jewish descent heritage stood with them. — Edwin Black

To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? "I am a peasant," I said to myself, "and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their roughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children. — Arthur Golden

The Hispanic culture is finding its way into the American culture. Places like Miami are going to be centers for that influence - places like Los Angeles and, certainly, cities in Texas. — Randy Falco

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair. — Jack Kemp

American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They're over-scaled. — James Howard Kunstler

I'd rather we were rebuilding Philadelphia, as opposed to Kabul ... There are American cities with serious infrastructure problems and we're not addressing them. — Mick Cornett

It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans - the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans. — Ray Nagin

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work. — Moshe Safdie

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction. — Lewis H. Lapham

The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalized police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman. — Colin Ward

I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head. — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

I've reported murders, scandals, marriages, premieres and national political conventions. I've been amused, intrigued, outraged, enthralled and exasperated by Chicago. And I've come to love this American giant, viewing it as the most misunderstood, most underrated city in the world. There is none other quite like my City of Big Shoulders. — Irv Kupcinet

Perhaps the most typically American place in America. — James Bryce

Let us never forget the greatest untapped market for American enterprise is right here in America, in the inner cities, in the rural areas. — William J. Clinton

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard. — Martin Filler

I'm not from Indianapolis, but I like living in Indianapolis. If I were to explain it, I'd tell someone to imagine a city that perfectly captures the best and the worst of America. Imagine the truly American city, because that's what it is. — John Green

Welcome to the American sector!
Feast your eyes on glorious Pluto, her wild frontier, her high standard of living, her rugged, hardworking citizens, her purple mountains majesty! Ride the mighty buffalo! Marvel at the bustling industry of the great cities of Jizo and Ascalaphus! Climb the peaks of Mt. Orcus and Mt. Chernobog! — Catherynne M Valente

This was the first time I had come face-to-face with the other side of fundamentalism. The fundamentalism that I saw in my neighborhood was sexist and misogynistic and small-minded, but it wasn't violent. It was giving and loving and brotherly. It was about helping the poor, and since everybody was poor, that meant everybody helping everybody. There wasn't the kind of urban meanness you find in many American cities. It was as if a farm community had been transplanted to the city. — Richard Engel

A few suits of clothes, some money in the bank, and a new kind of fear constitute the main differences between the average American today and the hairy men with clubs who accompanied Attila to the city of Rome. — Philip Wylie

Many cities make music, but no city breathes music quite like Memphis. The songs and sounds that come from here are uniquely American. — Shawn Amos

Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones - like Dresden - that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most. — Sebastian Junger

There are fewer Arabs in Tel Aviv, one of the largest cities in the Middle East, than there are in Chicago, the largest city in the American Midwest. How do you accomplish such a remarkable feat of social engineering without massive violence? — Max Blumenthal

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families. — Star Parker

Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance. — Daniel Akaka

As the world's 'most dynamic' cities seek to manage their own urban growth, American state and local officials have much to offer. Our mayors can share their experiences in urban design, clean energy projects, Smart Grids, codes for energy efficient buildings, transportation safety, and innovative environmental solutions. — Robert Hormats

New Orleans has a real spirit. It's the most authentic of all American cities. — Brad Pitt

Unfortunately there are still people in other areas who regard New York City not as part of the United States, but as a sort of excrescence fastened to our Eastern shore and peopled by the less venturesome waves of foreigners who failed to go West to the genuine American frontier. — Robert Moses

The bottom line is that we have entered an age when local communities need to invest in themselves. Federal and state dollars are becoming more and more scarce for American cities. Political and civic leaders in local communities need to make a compelling case for this investment. — Mick Cornett

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves. — Martin O'Malley

Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. In his defense, he probably just thought it was an American city because there were so many Mexicans there. — Jay Leno

According to the 2003 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 25.8 percent of [New Orleans] population lives below the poverty line ... This is more than twice the national average, but is close tot he percentages in other American cities such as Miami (28.5), Los Angeles (22.1), Atlanta (24.4), and New York City (21.2). — Billy Sothern

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities. — Jack Kerouac

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity. — Jane Jacobs

It is statistically irrefutable that those American cities with stringent "gun control" (e.g. N.Y.C., D.C., Chicago, L.A.) have higher crime rates. It is also irrefutable that those 31 states which have made conceal carry of handguns easy for law-abiding citizens have correspondingly enjoyed significant drops in their crime rates. — Kenneth W. Royce

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail. — H.L. Mencken

Nobody is denying we should investigate and do what we can to prevent gun crime in our cities and towns. But, we should not scapegoat the American gun owner for complicated, cultural problems we are just beginning to understand. — Bob Barr

The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts. — Darryl Pinckney

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency. — Jeffrey Eugenides

How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of the most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine boards for ordinary use. And, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns, to point his savageness with. — Henry David Thoreau

It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective. — Westbrook Pegler

In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as "either France or Sweden" and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger. — Dave Barry

I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities, but I forgot what it was. I have it written down at home somewhere. — David Byrne

[I]n all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city. — Daniel Dennett

There's no question that there's been a breach in the trust between urban - especially urban community, African-American and minority communities and the police in major American cities. — Mark Shields

I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life. — Joseph Stiglitz

Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people. — Charley Reese

Regarding The Music Man, Jay Nordlinger wrote: The Music Man (for which Willson also wrote the lyrics) is an astonishing creation. It came in a spurt of brilliance. It is shot through with originality, verve, and-why not go all the way?-genius. People love it, can't get enough of it, can't stop performing it-and they are not wrong. For closing in on a half- century now, The Music Man has been performed continually, in every American city, town, and village, and in other parts of the world as well, not excluding Peking. — Meredith Willson

I played with Joey Mullen back in Salt Lake City before he got called up to St. Louis. He was the first player ever to score 20 goals in the American League and 20 in the NHL. I've kept in contact with him and he's a great guy. — Alain Vigneault

I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets godawful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle. — Jack Kerouac

Chicago is the great American city, New York is one of the capitals of the world, and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic; San Francisco is a lady — Norman Mailer

I bow my head to the victims of terrorism. I am highly impressed of the courage of New York residents. The great city and the great American nation are to win! — Vladimir Putin

Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England. — Archibald MacLeish

I saw what I could [in Mexico City], but we rarely got anything other than big, mainstream American films. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

There is no presence of the American columns in the city of Baghdad at all. We besieged them and we killed most of them. — Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

The best way to get a sense of what kinds of emergencies might present themselves in your community is by contacting local chapters of the American Red Cross or offices of emergency management in the region or state. Most large cities will have their own offices of emergency management. — Irwin Redlener