On New York...

New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organpipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!
-- Salvador Dali

…the City of New York, the noblest of the American symbols.
-- Coast to Coast
James Morris

It is the only town where one's looks are drawn all the time away from the ground into the sky.
-- Dust in the Lion's Paw
Freya Stark

New York City sits bold and beautiful, brash and bounteous, a Big Apple, representing the best the country and people have to offer. Never has there been a city like it, nor will there be again…It's a city of achievers, often beset by adversity, but never bested by circumstances.
-- New York Facts
John Clementis

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
-- Midstream: My Later Life
Helen Keller

New York is, I firmly believe, the most charitable city in the world. Nowhere is there so eager a readiness to help, when it is known that help is worthily wanted. Nowhere are such armies of devoted workers, nowhere such an abundance of means ready to the hand of those who know the need and how rightly to supply it.
-- Jacob Riis, 1890

New York is simply a distillation of the United States, the most of everything, the conclusive proof that there is an American civilization. New York is casual, intellectual, subtle, effective, and devastatingly witty. But her sophisticated appearance is the thinnest of veneers. Beneath it there is power, virility, determination and sense of destiny.
-- Raymond F. Loewy, 1964

New York is to the nation what the white spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!
-- E.B. White, 1962