(3089/898) Two cities: NYC

1306) [New York] is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.

Jean Baudrillard
"New York" in
America (1986, tr. 1988) [CQ]

1307) The City of New York is currently undergoing a grave experiment that affects the comfort and, on occasion, the safety of even the most casual visitor. The experiment consists in seeing whether a city of that size can be operated on a far smaller amount of money than would make its life tolerable, and a still smaller amount than would make its life agreeable. The richer New Yorkers [...] are cooperating with an enthusiasm that the affluent rarely show for social experiment, and at great personal expense. They are paying for private security guards in unprecedented numbers and costly private schooling for their children ... and they are accepting numerous other costs and inconveniences in order to show that private affluence is consistent with public squalor.

John Kenneth Galbraith
"The United States"
New York (11/15/1971)
reprinted in A View From The Stands (1986) [CQ]

1308) New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, but I recognise that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.

Federico Garcia Lorca
interview (1931)
quoted in The Poet in New York (1940) [CQ]

1309) We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.

Edward Hoagland
"City Rat"
Audience (3/1972)
reprinted in Heart's Desire (1988) [CQ]

1310) [New York] is a beautiful catastrophe.

Le Corbusier
New York Herald Tribune (8/6/1961) [CQ]

1311) New York has trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer [...] In New York I have always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which rings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madness.

Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) [CQ]

1312) [New York] appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground) , to hang him from his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The Living City (1958) [CQ]

1313) I like it here in New York. I like the idea of having to keep eyes in the back of your head.

John Cale
London Times (9/27/1989) [CQ]

[Note: cf. Two cities: NYC (slight return)]

Sources

[CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 487 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.