I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

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

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.

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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