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.

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.

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil 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.

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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?

What is the city but the people?

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.

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.

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