Terry O'Quinn Quotes

Only people who live outside cities realize the size of them. London turns out to be huge; there are great swaths, vast panoramas, a whole diaspora I'd never imagined. The place I live in tends to be manageably small, a few familiar journeys and destinations.

I didn't want to go see mountainous areas as a kid - I wanted to be around town, around New York, around Connecticut.

At first, I didn't like coming down to Los Angeles at all. It's like, everything's black and white compared to where I live out in the middle of nowhere. There's, like, 400 people in my town!

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

I prefer the country life. I live in Kingston, but there is lots of trees.

I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.

Anaheim is not like Los Angeles, where there are more people and more paparazzi. You don't have that in Anaheim. It's more laid-back.

I love cities.

I don't see a lot of nature in L.A. Then again, I don't see a lot when I go back to St. Louis, either.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

In N.Y. you're always around people, but in L.A. you can go days without seeing anyone.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

New York and Los Angeles are really one city, and the rest of the country is America.

By 2050, seven out of ten people will live in cities, which will account for six billion people living in urban areas. That phenomenon is central to all the challenges humanity faces. If there is an issue to be addressed, then it is certainly happening in cities and therefore must be considered on an urban scale.

I don't care much for the cities.

In 2007, the majority of the world’s population – over 3 billion of us – will live in urban areas for the first time in history.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

...the concentration of human beings in towns...is contrary to nature, and...this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population...countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children...are starved of air and space and sunshine. ...This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilization and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathize with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us...the air must be purified...the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean...the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.

The city of Peking [Beijing] is a novel site for a European. He will not weary of admiring the manner in which the nearly 3 million people gathered within its vast enclosure are ruled by the police as schoolchildren by their masters. People coming and going fill streets wider than the Luxembourg Palace in Paris. The crowd is beyond belief, yet peace reigns everywhere.

I am very much a city boy, and I really don't get out into the countryside or the wilderness that much at all.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.