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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

What is the city but the people?

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.

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.

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