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.

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.

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

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.

What is the city but the people?

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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

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?

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

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

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

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.