“Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.”
“Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.”
“The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.”
“Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.”
“If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.”
“Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]”
“Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.”
“What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.”
“New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.”
“We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.”
“There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.”
“Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.”
“The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.”
“Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.”
“Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.”
“One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.”
“One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.”
“I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.”
“Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.”
“Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.”
“There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.”
“Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]”
“Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.”
“As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.”
“We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.”
“The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.”
“New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move.”
“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.”
“What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?”
“A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.”