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

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

Do you suppose that will change the sense of the morals, the fact that we can’t use morals as a means of judging the city because we couldn’t stand it? And that we’re changing our whole moral system to suit the fact that we’re living in a ridiculous way?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

One need merely visit the marketplace and the graveyard to determine whether a city is in both physical and metaphysical order.

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