Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

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

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.

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

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.