Word: greates
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Almost by definition, a city can be great only at the expense of other cities that are less than great. If the power, money and creativity that are now centered in London were divided with Birmingham, Birmingham would not become great, but London would be irretrievably lessened. A delight to live in and a joy to behold, Rome has certain qualities of greatness. It is redolent with tradition; it is the center of a universal religion; it has a people with character and a lively sense of politics. But it does not quite make the first rank of cities today...
...city does not have to be comfortable to be great, but it nonetheless must have the amenities to make life tolerable. Misery should not force thousands to live on the streets, as it does in the big cities of India; residents must be able to move from one place to another without undue strain or great delay; the conditions of life, ranging from prices to climate, cannot be totally oppressive. A great city also must have within its boundaries a large leisured class to pay for the culture and pleasure that are the outward signs of its preeminence. Money cannot...
Whatever else it may possess or lack, a great city cannot be dull. It must have a sense of place and a feeling all its own, and its citizens must be different from and more vital than those who live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every...
...great city retains the ancient magic even today. Men do not always love it; often, indeed, they hate it. More often still, they hate it and love it by turns. Yet once caught by it, they cannot forget or long leave it. "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, who did love Paris, "then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." New York, wrote Thomas Wolfe, who did not always love it, "lays hand upon...
Like all magic, the attraction of the great city is, in the end, beyond analysis and beyond definition. Marshall McLuhan and the late Frank Lloyd Wright may have been right in arguing that the city should be replaced by smaller communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris-or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar...