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?

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.

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.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

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

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

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

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.

What is the city but the people?

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