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.

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

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

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

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

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.

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?

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

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.