Top 17 American Cities Quotes

A few days after Bloody Sunday, there was demonstration in more than 80 American cities. People were demanding that the government act.

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.

I’m old enough to remember when the air over American cities was a lot dirtier than it is now.

We haven’t had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

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.

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.

China’s ability to deliver nuclear warheads on American cities is expanding.

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.

There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there’s a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.

American cities are not scaled to the energy diet of the future. They have become too large. They’re over-scaled.

I haven’t seen too many similarities between Montreal and American cities.

Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.

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.

Political corruption is endemic all over this country, in some places worse than others, right? On crime, you have all the major American cities where the crime rates at different points in their histories, have spiked dramatically.

If you look at people who seek a lot of care in American cities for multiple illnesses, it’s usually people with a number of overwhelming illnesses and a lot of social problems, like housing instability, unemployment, lack of insurance, lack of housing, or just bad housing.

The U.S. does not want to live under the shadow of a North Korea that possesses long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads to American cities. At the same time, the U.S. has no appetite for a war that would prove costly by every measure.

In my view, nothing would do more to reduce violence in American cities than genuine full employment – a job at a decent wage for every person who wants to work. Numerous studies have shown that violence increases with unemployment.