The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.
I am a village boy, and Amsterdam for me was always the big town.
The life of the village became more and more affected by strikes and lock-outs.
I was privileged because my father was a policeman, and we lived in town. Many people in Malawi are from typical villages. My grandmother insisted I should be in both worlds, and so I needed to be acquainted with village life.
I should not romanticize the simplicity of a village. For instance, the place from where I used to buy a packet of glucose biscuits in my village is now selling cellphones.
I grew up Windlesham in Surrey, which is a beautiful and quaint village.
I belong to the generation of workers who, born in the villages and hamlets of rural Poland, had the opportunity to acquire education and find employment in industry, becoming in the course conscious of their rights and importance in society.
We were, as Arabs in Israel, educated not to leave our villages, in order to protect our identity.
Being prime minister isn't the only job in life! As far as I'm concerned, I could live in a village and be satisfied.
In rural parts of China, it's like stepping back into the era of my grandfather or great-grandfather - not much has changed.
I’ve never thought much about whether I was happy or if I had fun as a child. I was a so-so girl who lived with a so-so family in a so-so village. I didn’t know that there might be another way to live, and I didn’t worry about it either.
My father came to Chennai at the age of 16 from a village in Coimbatore. He was an artist and was clear he wanted to do something, so he came to Chennai and joined an art course for eight years before he came into films.
I knew that no matter what door you knock on in a Cretan village, it will be opened for you. A meal will be served in your honor, and you will sleep between the best sheets in the house. In Crete, the stranger is still the unknown god. Before him, all doors and all hearts are opened.
In 1990, my wife and I were married in her village in southwestern Uganda. The festivities went on for three days, and all the while a couple of dozen gray-crowned cranes, with regal bonnets of sun-shot yellow feathers, were pecking and padding around in the adjacent savanna.
My secondary schooling was at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, so I'm fond of that part of the world. It's quintessentially English, with village greens, pubs and cricket pitches, and resonates strongly with me.
Villages are small and personal, and their inhabitants have names, characters, and personalities. What more appropriate concept on which to base our institutions of the future than the ancient social unit whose flexibility and strength substained human society through millenia?
I grew up in a small town in Sudan. There weren't many cars, so we did things in the countryside near where we lived.
Maybe there's less oppression growing up in a small village, and fewer rules, and less danger.
A village is a hive of glass, where nothing unobserved can pass.
Return to the villages means a definite, voluntary recognition of the duty of bread labour and all its connotes.
The village I come from is the most ruthless, lawless land one can encounter.
My mother is from Greece: she comes from Vrahos, a small village in Kastoria.
Basic education links the children, whether of the cities or the villages, to all that is best and lasting in India.
I grew up in a very rural community in England.
My family actually lived in the same village for about 400 years. They had great stability until the last century. People lived and intermarried in small villages.
