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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified heads, fills citified ears—as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk happy.

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

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.