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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.