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

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

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

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.

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

There is a city in which you find everything you desire—handsome people, pleasures, ornaments of every kind—all that the natural person craves. However, you cannot find a single wise person there.

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

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.

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.

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

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.

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

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