I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow.

Peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete.

The urban man is an uprooted tree, he can put out leaves, flowers and grow fruit but what a nostalgia his leaf, flower, and fruit will always have for mother earth!

The thing generally raised on city land is taxes.

What is the city but the people?

To the newcomer who has not learned its language, a large city is a chaos of details, a vast Woolworths store of differently colored, simlarly priced objects.

No wonder the streets had seemed so empty. The city [Minneapolis] had gone somewhere else and cunningly hidden itself inside its own fagade.

The city is squalid and sinister, With the silver-barred street in the midst, Slow-moving, A river leading nowhere.

The planner's problem is to find ways of creating, within the urban environment, the sense of belonging.

In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.

God made the country, and man made the town.

I like the rough impersonality of New York ... Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.

The slum is the measure of civilization.

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city

If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.

A quiet city is a contradiction in terms. It is a thing uncanny, spectral.

A very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed.

New Orleans is stirring, rattling, and sliding faintly in its fragrance and in the enormous richness of its lust; taxis are still parked along Dauphine Street and the breastlike, floral air is itchy with the stilletos and embroiderings above black blood drumthroes of an eloquent cracked indiscoverable cornet, which exists only in the imagination and somewhere in the past, in the broken heart of Louis Armstrong; yet even in that small portion which is the infested genitals of that city, never free, neither of desire nor of waking pain, there are the qualities of the tender desolations of profoundest night.