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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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