- Frances FitzGerald: No one really knows New York- not even New Yorkers. The city is too big, too diverse, and too complex for anyone to comprehand. New York is many cities interlaced with one another, each in constant independent motion. Everything sees its time in New York.
- Norman Mailer: When you put buildings that are huge and anonymous, with repellent surfaces and a lack of decoration, what you're saying is that the nature of power is that way, it's abstract, it's impersonal, it's immense, and you can't get near it. Now maybe that's always been the nature of power, much more than people have realized. Maybe there's a certain honesty in modern architecture. What it says is that we at the top don't give a damn about you at the bottom.
- Joseph Papp: There's a lot of ferment still going on in this city, because, there's a lot of unhappiness still going on in this city, and there are a lot of minority people living in terribly dreadful conditions, and the conditions of the middle class is terrible in New York. And something has to happen. But people are alive, living, and having some kind of energy about life. That's good. I think that's New York.
- Ed Koch: We walk faster, we talk faster, we think faster. The quintessential New Yorker is someone who has street smarts, who can't be conned, who sees the humor in the most difficult of situations, and who knows that, somehow or other, with all of the problems, we're not only going to overcome, but we're lucky to be living in this city.
- Ed Koch: We have over 150 different races and religions and ethnic groups and, somehow or other, we're all living together. What we have done is we have retained our individuality, our cultural traditions, our special feeling about things if we're Jewish, as I am, or Italian, or Irish, or Black, or Hispanic, or Ukrainian, and nevertheless maintaining our own traditions. We're still all, somehow or other, New Yorkers, and we've made our peace with one another.