A Quote by Lewis H. Lapham

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

Lewis H. Lapham

Quote Topics

Abstraction Advantage American American Cities Beauty Best Buildings Cities Distance Height Most Point Seen Shop Ugliness

Quote Author

Lewis H. Lapham
American - Editor
Born: January 8, 1935

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

Jerry Saltz

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Joseph Brodsky

Well, first of all the Dominion Bureau of Statistics made a survey in the spring of 1970, which showed that on balance the difference in the cost of living between Canadian cities and American cities was 5 % to the advantage, of course, to the Canadian cities.

Leonard Woodcock

The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness

J. Rufus Fears

The ugliness of the beauty is much horrible than the ugliness of the ugliness.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.

Umberto Eco

Nothing lasts forever. But—especially as it seems to me cities and humans are symbiotically and inextricably bound at this point—I hope cities have a good, long run. Plus, cities are beautiful creatures in their own right; and as with us, their vulnerability and ephemerality are part of that beauty.

Alex Shakar

When I go to American cities and speak to American audiences about Karachi, I am able to draw their own wonder and consternation about the cities they live in as an entry point to this other faraway, instant city.

Steve Inskeep

I just want to build the best buildings. It's not about me, it's about the buildings, creating a space where society can gather and marvel in beauty and nature.

Santiago Calatrava

Since hearing beauty in something is essentially a positive response and hearing ugliness is negative, might it ultimately be more difficult for an open-minded listener to define ugliness than it is to define beauty?

Frank J. Oteri

Charleston is one of the best built, handsomest, and most agreeable cities that I have ever seen.

Marquis de Lafayette

I think London is one of the best cities to shop in.

Chiara Ferragni

I prefer ugliness to beauty, because ugliness endures.

Serge Gainsbourg

My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see

Marcel Duchamp

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.