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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What is the city but the people?

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.

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.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.