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

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

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.

What is the city but the people?

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.

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?

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.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

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

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.

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