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.

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.

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.

We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.

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

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

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?

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

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

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