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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.

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

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