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Let the villages of the future live in our imagination, so that we might one day come to live in them!
— Mahatma GandhiI have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticise that easily.
—Arundhati RoyA relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.
—Erich FrommThe new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
—Marshall McLuhanI’m luckier than my grandfather, who didn’t move more than five miles from the village in which he was born.
— David AttenboroughI come from a small village and have had no formal training in music or any classes from the masters of Indian classical music.
— IlaiyaraajaIf you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
— Charles Caleb ColtonA village is a hive of glass, where nothing unobserved can pass.
— Charles SpurgeonAs a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the moon—it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.
— Naveen JainYou need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.
— Cesare PaveseAccess to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
— Muhammad YunusIt takes only one child to raze a village.
— Florence King
(This story appears in the 19 June, 2020 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)