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

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

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.

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.

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

What is the city but the people?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?