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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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