My ideas are clear. My orders are precise. Within five years, Rome must appear marvelous to all the people of the world—vast, orderly, powerful, as in the time of the empire of Augustus.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What is the city but the people?

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

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?