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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.