We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

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.

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

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

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

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. 

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

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.

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?

What is the city but the people?

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.

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