Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

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

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

What is the city but the people?

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.