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.

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

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

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

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

What is the city but the people?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.