All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitants ... do not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.
(Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British author. "Oaxaca," Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934).)
Arrive at New Orleans, a city of ships, steamers, flatboats, rafts, mud, fog, filth, stench, and a mixture of races and tongues. Cholera, "some." [At] Planters' Hotel. Mem:Never get caught in a cheap tavern in a strange city.
(Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893), U.S. president. Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States, vol. I, p. 239, ed. Charles Richard Williams, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 5 vols. (1922-1926), Diary (December 21, 1848).
Written after he became ill at the "miserable" Planters' Hotel.)
Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited; if the Romans consulted the heavens for guidance in this effort, the city fathers of New York consulted the banks.
(Richard Sennett (b. 1943), U.S. social historian. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, conclusion, Norton (1994).)
The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
(Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), U.S. social philosopher. The Culture of Cities, introduction (1938).)
Push, labor, shove,these words of great power in a city like this. Two years must find me with a living and increasing business, or I quit the city and probably the profession.
(Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893), U.S. president. Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States, vol. I, p. 338, ed. Charles Richard Williams, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 5 vols. (1922-1926), Diary (November 22, 1850).
Written while a struggling attorney in Cincinnati.)
From Washington, proverbially "the city of distances," through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. Speech, February 7, 1844, the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, Massachusetts. "The Young American," Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).)