City life is millions of people being lonesome together.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
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.
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
When in Rome, do as Rome does.
All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.
Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
Just as language has no longer 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.
Either these - unsaved people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
or simply:
