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.

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

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.