City and Everyday Life

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

Sea of upturned faces.

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell. . . . You enterprised a railroad . . . you blasted its rocks away. . . . And now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

The 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.

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.

As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market-place; and where the market-place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.

Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.

Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stage-coach.