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

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

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.

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?

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?

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

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.

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

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