Lapham’s Quarterly

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

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

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

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

Just as language no longer has anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

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

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

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.

What is the city but the people?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

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

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