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

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.

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

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.

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were.