It is men who make a city, not walls or ships.

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.

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.

What is the city but the people?

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

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

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.

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

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

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

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?

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

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