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.

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

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

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.

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

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.

What is the city but the people?

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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.

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.