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

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.

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

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

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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

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

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