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

What is the city but the people?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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