Quotes & Sayings About Cities And Towns

And somewhere
out there,
in the river of
addicts,
alcoholics,
wife beaters,
doormats,
overeducated legalized thieves,
fascist police,
and bitter rivalries
someone told me
it's a good city,
and I don't know
what's more frightening — Phil Volatile

The only thing that I discovered very early on is that, even though we might change schools and cities and towns and states, the books in the library were the same. They had the same covers. They had the same characters. I could go and visit those people in the library as if I knew them. — J. Michael Straczynski

Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their subjects, others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions ... Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia [an Italian city] by factions and Pisa by fortress, and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily. — Niccolo Machiavelli

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. — Jane Jacobs

Malls in the late forties and early fifties were risky. Suburban customers still believed in making major purchases in the central business districts of cities and towns, where they expected to find the greatest selection of merchandise and the most competitive prices. After the tax laws of 1954, this changed. Shopping mall developers were among the biggest beneficiaries of accelerated depreciation, and they most often located projects where the older strips met the new interchanges of major projects. With the new tax write-offs, over 98 percent of malls made money for their investors. — Dolores Hayden

Paths you don't use, houses you don't use and even towns and cities you don't use will be the path of nature, the house of nature, the town and the city of nature! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute. — Andrew Jackson

The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks - the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. — James Baldwin

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

Why do we insist on building the largest and most impressive structures in our city when people on the other side of town are hungry, jobless and worshipping in storefronts? — K.P. Yohannan

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride
the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes
from two-fifty to four-fifteen
and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. — Truman Capote

"Glorious, stirring sight!" murmured Toad ... "The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today - in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped- always somebody else's horizons! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!" — Kenneth Grahame

We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns and cities. — George W. Sears

So much dung, filth, and entrails of dead beasts and other corruptions is cast into ditches, rivers and other waterways, and many other places, within about and near to the cities, boroughs and towns of the realm ... that the air is greatly corrupted and infected and many maladies and other intolerable diseases do daily happen ... '64 They ordered fines of £20 to be levied on all those who had not remedied the situation within a year, and passed the responsibility for keeping the streets clean to local officers. — Ian Mortimer

To say the least, a town life makes one more tolerant and liberal in one's judgment of others. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Our mandate in Habitat for Humanity is to work diligently to help bring into being graceful communities, towns, and cities. his is so important because the alternative is disgraceful. We must begin to think like this. If we do, we will increasingly see transformations in our communities. — Millard Fuller

Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed and sleep like a dead man. — Neil Gaiman

If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have. — Sebastian Junger

Cities on the ocean have a choice whether to turn their faces or their backs to the water, lining the shore either with pretty hotels and rich homes or dim warehouses, narrow streets, and greasy piers. All prairie towns turn away from the prairie, however. The huddled houses form a storm-battened island in the midst of endless space. — Joseph Bottum

Pizzerias in big cities benefit from Italian natives or descendants thereof, people who understand that real pizza comes from Naples where the crusts are thin and the toppings simple. Samantha's favorite was Lazio's, a hole-in-the-wall in Tribeca where the cooks yelled in Italian as they baked the crusts in brick ovens. Like most things in her life these days, Lazio's was far away. So was the pizza. The only place in Brady to get one to go was a sub shop in a cheap strip mall. Pizza Hut, along with most other national chains, had not penetrated deep into the small towns of Appalachia. — John Grisham

Townspeople themselves were eager for change and experiment. From their point of view, Catholicism was tied in with customs and festivals that made sense in a farming community. People in towns and cities needed to have their industries work without being interrupted by all the feast days of the Catholic faith. — Michael A. Mullett

The youth of Taiwan not only have to face the harsh reality of low wages and high commodity and housing prices, but due to the lack of employment opportunities, many young people are forced to leave their home towns to search for jobs in the cities. — Tsai Ing-wen

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars
those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood. — Jack Kerouac

Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: "Here," he said, "are the walls of the city," meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants. — Francois Rabelais

Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. — Neil Gaiman

I came to recognize the landscape of my life in the lives of many women. Their stories and the places they spoke of spanned a world beyond my experience, from mill towns to suburbs, from logging camps to ethnic neighborhoods, from inner cities to Indian reservations. Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters. But as I stood in the living room of my rock house that afternoon, I was again reminded of the enormous power of this prairie, its silence and the whisper I made inside it. I had forgotten how easily one person can be lost here. — Judy Blunt

An unfolding technology has increased our economic strength and added to the convenience of our lives. But that same technology-we know now-carries danger with it. From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation's cities each year. From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West. — Friedrich Engels

City and country
each has its own beauty and its own pain. Some of the smallness of small towns
cattiness, everybody knowing everybody's business
that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically. — William P. Young

The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,
travel a whole day together,
looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories. — David Lynch

From this distance, in the dimness, the model looked surreal, made up of parts filled with buildings, bordered by long stretches of empty space. It reminded me of the way cities and towns look when you are flying at night. You can't make out much. But the places where people have come together, and stayed, are collections of tiny lights, breaking up the darkness. — Sarah Dessen

Then the LORD said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites and say to them: 'When you cross the Jordan into Canaan, select some towns to be your cities of refuge, to which a person who has killed someone accidentally may flee. They will be places of refuge from the avenger, so that anyone accused of murder may not die before they stand trial before the assembly. — Anonymous

The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on. — Jason Epstein

Towns and cities throughout the United States have opened their hearts and homes to thousands of families displaced from their homes as a result of this horrific storm. — Jo Bonner

Agriculture seems to be the first pursuit of civilized man. It enables him to escape from the life of the savage, and wandering shepherd, into that of social man, gathered into fixed communities and surrounding himself with the comforts and blessings of neighborhood, country, and home. It is agriculture alone, that fixes men in stationary dwellings, in villages, in towns, and cities, and enables the work of civilizations, in all its branches, to go on. — Edward Everett

My god! i'm thinking, what incredible shit we've put up with most of our lives - the domestic routine (same old jobs, insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and tv machines and telephones -! ah christ!, i'm thinking, at the same time that i'm waving goodby to that hollering idiot on shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote) — Edward Abbey

I've seen a lot of the United States, having stayed in so many different cities and towns for work. It's such a strange and fascinating country, and instead of learning about it through a textbook, I would rather discover its history and traditions and institutions through fiction and nonfiction writers. — Hope Davis

The traditional neighborhood - represented by mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities of varied population, either standing free as villages or grouped into towns and cities - has proved to be a sustainable form of growth. It allowed us to settle the continent without bankrupting the country or destroying the countryside in the process. — Andres Duany

It was the hard work of our people, the freedom they enjoyed and their faith in God that built this country and made it the envy of the world. In all of our great cities and towns evidence of the faith of our people is found: houses of worship of every denomination are among the oldest structures. While never willing to bow to a tyrant, our forefathers were always willing to get to their knees before God. When catastrophe threatened, they turned to God for deliverance. When the harvest was bountiful the first thought was thanksgiving to God. — Ronald Reagan

Water wrestles great opponents,
but has no hands,
and tramples great rivals,
but has no feet.
It slips through our fingers,
but can swallow entire towns.
Wind also slips through our fingers,
but can swallow entire cities. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The Republicans did not set out to establish a strong national state or to facilitate the industrial revolution. They believed strongly in the American dream of hard work and upward mobility. They saw no contradiction between capital and labor, between wealth accumulation and equality. Even in the exigencies of war, they directed their legislation to their political base, the farmers and the small-town merchants. Their vision assumed the virtue of rural and small-town America. The majority of Republicans who enacted the legislation grew up on farms. Yet they created an industrial juggernaut that flung railroads across the continent and grew great cities from seaboard to seaboard that attracted thousands from those small towns and farms. These results must be counted among the most sterling examples of unintended consequences in American history.18 — David R. Goldfield

In India, we now see many highly qualified professionals ready to work in the rural hinterland and in their own towns and cities to tackle development issues directly without depending much on the government. — Jacqueline Novogratz

Entire countries are reduced to their metonyms. Kenya is a safari, Norway is fjords. And Switzerland is mountains. This is an exaggeration, but the truth in it is worth thinking about: it is a country built largely in the lee of the Alps, the towns and cities formed from old human migrations that came to rest in valleys, on lakeshores, and, sometimes, in higher regions. I had a notion: if I could understand the mountains, I could understand the country." (from "Known and Strange Things" by Teju Cole) — Teju Cole

I didn't just start with ... local city officials because I knew that they would understand the problem. I started with them because I knew that our cities, towns and counties would be a key part of the solution to this issue ... there is no one-size-fits all policy or program that can solve this problem. And Washington certainly does not have all the answers. Instead, many of the best, most innovative, most effective solutions start in our city halls and our towns and our county councils. — Michelle Obama

I remember the evacuee children from towns and cities throwing stones at the farm animals. When we explained that if you did that you wouldn't have any milk, meat or eggs, they soon learned to respect the animals. — Mary Wesley

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here. — B.W. Powe

By 2050, the Australian population is expected to grow from 22 million to 36 million. That increase alone will put huge pressure on our towns and our cities. We will need more homes, more roads, more rail lines, more hospitals, more schools, just to accommodate so many Australians. — Kevin Rudd

I think the future of architecture does not lie so much in continuing to fill up the landscape, as in bringing back life and order to our cities and towns. — Gottfried Bohm

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. — Henry David Thoreau

Take down the walls.
That is, after all, the whole point.
You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don't know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction.
Take down the walls.
Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.
Otherwise you may never know hell; but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying.
All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling you stomach.
And pull, and pull, and pull.
I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever.
Take down the walls. — Lauren Oliver

A stage adaptation of The Giver has been performed in cities and towns across the USA for years. More recently an opera has been composed and performed. And soon there will be a film. Does The Giver have the same effect when it is presented in a different way: It's hard to know. A book, to me is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat. The important thing is that another medium
stage, film, music
doesn't obliterate a book. The movie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn't gone away. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way. — Lois Lowry

My films play only in Bengal, and my audience is the educated middle class in the cities and small towns. They also play in Bombay, Madras and Delhi where there is a Bengali population. — Satyajit Ray

area was less busy, swirling like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn't acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do. After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to — Kat Richardson

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light a candle that can guide us through the darkness to a safe and sure future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do.
The problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier - a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.
It has been a long road to this crowded convention city. Now begins another long journey, taking me into your cities and towns and homes all over America.
Give me your help. Give me your hand, your voice and your vote. — John F. Kennedy

Not so long ago, I visited relatives in Italy.

I took a daytime stroll to the famous (infamous) Roman Coliseum, and marveled at the engineering feat to build such a magnificent structure.

Being a Christian, I was suddenly thunderstruck at the thought of how many Christians perished in some of the most cruel way possible, some torn limb to limb by starved lions, simply because they refused to denounce Jesus Christ as their savior.
Yet here in America, a land blessed by God ( a ragtime army of patriots defeat one of the most powerful standing armies in the world) and founded on religious freedom, we allow them to remove prayer from the schools, remove nativity scenes from our cities and towns and abort millions of children.
Where's the outrage?
What has happened to us?
Jim Balzotti — Jim Balzotti

The quality of life of European cities and towns of almost any size make life in America look not just like a joke, but a sick joke, a horror movie. But I'd rather stay involved and do what I can to make this a better place than move to the south of France and enjoy the good life. — James Howard Kunstler

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town. — Annie Dillard

If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don't conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life. — Sela Ward

People going into the cities for the opportunities and the towns are getting older, no young people. — Rachel Griffiths

A similar statement appears in the US Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (European War) (30 September 1945): The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring. — George C. Marshall

Every city and town in America would be bankrupt if they kept their books the way private-sector companies keep their books - because of the obligation cities and towns have taken upon themselves to provide health care for their retirees. — Clayton M Christensen

Over the next few days we want cities, towns and villages across the UK to send a message to Scotland: stay with us. — Ed Miliband

while there existed great towns and cities all over the world, there was a certain kind of pleasure, a certain type of adventurous and audacious childhood, that only New York City could offer a child. — Imbolo Mbue

Do I have any recommendations for a Sadiri boys' night out?" I shrugged, smiled, and allowed myself a laugh. "I can come up with something."
I did, too. The Ministry of Culture has all kinds of programmes, and I got someone to put together a package that even the Sadiri might enjoy. But people, this is Cygnus Beta. Yes, we have a few large cities and several towns
we're not all country bumpkins, vagabonds and adventurers
but there are few professional artists and actors, few galactic-standard museums and theatres. We simply can't afford them. — Karen Lord

Behind every small business, there's a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores - these didn't come out of nowhere. — Paul Ryan

We need to reach the millions who live in cities, the hundreds of thousands in industrial centers, the tens of thousands in medium-sized towns, the thousands in small towns, and the hundreds in villages
all these at once. Like a volcanic eruption, a spiritual revolution needs to spread through the country, to spur people to crucial decisions. People have to recognize the futility of splitting life up into politics, economics, the humanities, and religion. We must be awakened to a life in which all of these things are completely integrated. — Eberhard Arnold

In our towns and cities they will continue to be born, in our communities they will go on to be nurtured & radicalised & from within our neighbourhoods they will terrorise & murder our citizens including women & children in their attempt to destroy the very fabric & order of our civilised society. They are influenced by our ignorance, our lack of knowledge is their power, martyrdom in the name of their God and prophet is their aspiration & so it is critical that we waste no time & learn more about them & this ideology they follow before we can even begin to eradicate this chilling & growing endemic Islamic faith based terrorism'. — Cal Sarwar

Having covered some half a hundred cities, towns, villages, and wide spots in the road during the last tow years, George and I fairly wallowed in the comfort of our own home base. — Martin Milner

In 1963, the U.N. Security Council declared a voluntary arms embargo on South Africa. That was extended to a mandatory embargo in 1977. And that was followed by economic sanctions and other measures - sometimes officials, countries, cities, towns - some organized by popular movements. — Noam Chomsky

The more people who own little businesses of their own, the safer our country will be, and the better off its cities and towns; for the people who have a stake in their country and their community are its best citizens. — John Hancock

The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusory to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle'
to the extent, that is, they have first appeared on the television screen, which henceforth had to be seen as an urbanistic tool in its own right. — Tom McDonough

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. — Kevin Powers

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way. — Cynthia Ozick

Over the past month, Muslims have fasted, taking no food or water during daylight hours, in order to refocus their minds on faith and redirect their hearts to charity. Muslims worldwide have stretched out a hand of mercy to those in need. Charity tables at which the poor can break their fast line the streets of cities and towns. And gifts of food and clothing and money are distributed to ensure that all share in God's abundance. Muslims often invite members of other families to their evening iftar meals, demonstrating a spirit of tolerance. — George W. Bush

If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution. — Eugene V. Debs

Statistically, to embrace this level of socio-cultural change will invariably lead to the enforcement of Sharia Law on the major towns and cities in Europe and Britain, (such as London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Lincolnshire etc.) Any area, in which Sharia Law is already borderline enforced near no-go zones. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded. — Kate Atkinson

The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks. Yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities, food surpluses and improved transportation were not enough. The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war. And if no agreement can be reached, strife spreads, even if the storehouses are bulging. It was not food shortages that caused most of history's wars and revolutions. The — Yuval Noah Harari

I had been in so many towns and cities in America with John Kennedy, but I was not with him in Dallas, Texas, on November 21, 1963. — Pierre Salinger

My campaign is based upon the proposition that the answers to the problems which currently plague our cities, our towns, and our homes, are not to be found in the decisions in Washington. They are instead to be found in the hearts, minds and resources of our own people here at home. — Jerry Springer

Theatres, along with the likes of the Ulster Orchestra, for example, are the cultural heartbeats of our towns and cities, and without them, we are much poorer for it. — James Nesbitt

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns. — Don DeLillo

What else is a nation but a patchwork of cities and towns; cities and towns a patchwork of neighborhoods; and neighborhoods a patchwork of homes? — Matthew Desmond

In the past, heartland whites with some kind of dream or desire left their towns for cities to become citified. They wanted to get away from religion, from their families, they wanted to come out, make art, have sex, have experiences. But this new crew was something we had never seen before. They were the first generation of suburban Americans. They came, not to be citified, but rather to change cities into places they could recognize and dominate. — Sarah Schulman

...Americans didn't stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off for the green world beyond, so that by the 1970 Census, we had become the first suburban nation in the history of the world. And Detroit led the way, with a population curve up and down just like everywhere else, but with its urban decline a lot steeper over the past sixty years - so typical a place that it only looks like an exception. — Jerry Herron

Memory, faith, and the natural world as both witness to the cycle of human life and healer to a questioning heart are at the core of this lovely and lyrical collection of poems. The weather changes, people come and go from cities and towns, babies are born, grow up and depart from their parents' arms, but still, the countryside and its rituals sustain the people and creatures who know how to read the signs of the seasons. In these pages, Laura Grace Weldon shares those signs with us; her poems are the fruit of a wonderful harvest. — Eleanor Lerman

I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face. — Neil Peart

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

Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up by the sheer will of true believers. — Sarah Vowell

The people of God are His representatives upon the earth, and He intends that they shall be lights in the moral darkness of this world. Scattered all over the country, in the towns, cities, and villages, they are God's witnesses, the channels through which He will communicate to an unbelieving world the knowledge of His will and the wonders of His grace. It — Ellen G. White

Have you ever, on a cloudless night, looked down from a passing aircraft flying over Canada? Endless, glowing strings of cities, towns, and homesteads. Stretching on and on, one province to the next. With only the stars in the distance. — Paul Martin

Together, cotton and slavery would ensure that there would be no war. Since southerners did not want an armed conflict, it could only come as a result of northern aggression. But northerners would be insane to attempt to challenge the South militarily. Alexander Stephens, soon to become Vice-President of the Confederacy, was not an ardent secessionist. But he struck the same note as the most extreme secessionist when he declared that there was "not a flourishing village or hamlet in the North, to say nothing of their towns and cities, that does not owe its prosperity to Southern cotton". Moreover "England, with her millions of people and billions upon billions of pounds sterling, could not survive six months without it". — John Ashworth

This is the way the power industry began in the days of Muncie, Indiana. Each town had one power plant, and there were no power lines between cities or towns. Moreover, technological developments are forcing a new look at this sort of design, nowadays referred to as microgrids. However, with current technologies and costs, microgrids are not yet cheaper than power from the large-scale grid. In other words, if you want an electric power supply that is extremely reliable - that is, very rarely has blackouts - at the lowest possible price, you need a fleet of large generators and a grid interconnecting them. — Peter Fox-Penner

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

One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into town, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it. — Patrick Ness

The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes ... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so. — John Steinbeck

There's nothing left of my hometown in Kentucky. All those small and mid-sized towns and cities in the U.S. are just about malls around the edges and suburbs. That was definitely a loss, because everything just gets homogenized. You can't tell where you are, it's all the same. — Richard Hell

I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven't gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven't. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you've bypassed at seventy miles an hour. * — Philip Caputo

Standup keeps me grounded and keeps me in touch. I get to go from small towns to big cities, across Canada and the U.S., and you're out there and talking to people. You get a sense of what they respond to. — Howie Mandel