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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

What is the city but the people?

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