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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

What is the city but the people?

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

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