American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in…

I see nothing easy in Washington. I see either analytically simple things that are politically complex or those that are politically complex and analytically…

— Henry Paulson

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am increasingly convinced that people who have power are not necessarily smarter than others. Beyond a certain level of intelligence and level in…

— Jeffrey Pfeffer

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a…

— Nicholas Lemann

We are ever aware that politics is an ugly struggle that determines 'who gets what, when, and how.' It is the favorite occupation of…

— Hans F. Sennholz

The real illness of the American city today, and especially of the deprived groups within it, is voicelessness.

— John Henry Cox

[Chicago] is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other…

— John Gunther

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city.

— Tom Piazza

In all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is…

— Daniel Dennett

A natural disaster in one American city is a natural disaster in every American city, including Fresno and, for that matter, every city and…

— Alan Autry

Traffic growled and snarled, rising at times to a machine-gun rata-tat-tat, while pedestrians were scuttling about with that desperate ratlike urgency characteristic of all…

— Fritz Leiber

What must be addressed in the most immediate sense is the threat that the emerging police state in the United States poses not to…

— Henry Giroux

Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. In his defense, he probably just…

— Jay Leno

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern…

— Martin Filler