Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?

My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.

It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. 

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.