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

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

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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

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.

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

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.

What is the city but the people?

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

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

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.