We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

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

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.

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.

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

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

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.

What is the city but the people?

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

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

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

The country only has charms for those not obliged to stay there. 

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.