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

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.

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

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. 

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

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

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?

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.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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.

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.