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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What is the city but the people?

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.

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

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.