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

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

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.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk happy.

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

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.

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.

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.

What is the city but the people?

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

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.