Terry Pratchett Quotes

The Bronx always seemed very dreary to me.

Detroit is a city that really stands out. It's been through a very difficult time. There's been a lot of pain here, and the city, physically, has suffered. You can see it in certain neighborhoods, and there's buildings downtown that have been abandoned.

Baltimore is a goddamn ghetto. It's worse than Washington. It is shit.

New York City isn't Chuck E. Cheese. We don't have ball pits for the kids to play in. We have titty bars and crack.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Nothing in Chicago seems to be working the way it’s supposed to.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

The tendency is away from the farm and away from the rural districts ; the trend is toward the city, where the needy congregate and where crime becomes organized and where the Republic is stabbed

I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings.

South Tel Aviv has turned into the garbage can of the country.

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.

Environmental damage such as graffiti, fly-posting and general littering is a menace that is becoming all too prevalent, not just in inner cities but in many communities - urban and rural.

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

Gotham City. Clean shafts of concrete and snowy rooftops. The work of men who died generations ago. From here, it looks like an achievement. From here, you can't see the enemy.

New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.

You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone's yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

The family which takes it mauve and cerise, air conditioned, power-steered, and power braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground.