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.

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

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk happy.

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?

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

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

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

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

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

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.