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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

What is the city but the people?

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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