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

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.

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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