A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.
A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it — an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.
All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.
All things may be bought in Rome with money.
America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.
An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.
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.
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.
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.
Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.
Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.