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

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

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.

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.

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.

We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

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?

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.