Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.