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.

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.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.