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.

What is the city but the people?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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