Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and mat...erial that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The city mouse eats bread and cheese;-- The garden mouse eats what he can;... We will not grudge him seeds and stocks, Poor little timid furry man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive for...m of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a ...flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an... urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider... it a triumph of the suffrage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over... the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »