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

What is the city but the people?

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

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

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.

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

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

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

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

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

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.

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the 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.