Quotes
Quotes about Cities
He that can take rest is greater than he that can take cities.
The castled crag of Drachenfels, Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine, Whose breast of waters broadly swells Between the banks which bear the vine, And hills all rich with blossom'd trees, And fields which promise corn and wine, And scatter'd cities crowning these, Whose far white walls along them shine.
Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.
What cities, as great as this, have . . . promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others others. . . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.
Straightway throughout the Libyan cities flies rumor;--the report of evil things than which nothing is swifter; it flourishes by its very activity and gains new strength by its movements; small at first through fear, it soon raises itself aloft and sweeps onward along the earth. Yet its head reaches the clouds. . . . A huge and horrid monster covered with many feathers: and for every plume a sharp eye, for every pinion a biting tongue. Everywhere its voices sound, to everything its ears are open. [Lat., Extemplo Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes: Fama malum quo non velocius ullum; Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo; Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras, Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubilia condit. . . . . Monstrum, horrendum ingens; cui quot sunt corpore plumae Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu, Tot linquae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures.]
In Vietnam the CIA dressed as Viet Cong and in their uniform performed atrocities on Catholics and Buddhists. * (the same thing is being done to the Shiites and Sunnis by mosque bombers.. with the US military or Sharon operatives tagged as Sunnis for Shiites and Shiites for Sunnis).
The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.
White swan of cities, slumbering in thy nest So wonderfully built among the reeds Of the lagoon, that fences thee and feeds, As sayeth thy old historian and thy guest!
