The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

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

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

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.

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.

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.