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.

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

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.

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

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

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

What is the city but the people?

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.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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.

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

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