Talie

“In both the old and the new quarters a pitch of foulness and filth was reached that the lowest serf's cottage scarcely achieved in medieval Europe. It is almost impossible to enumerate objectively the bare details of this housing without being suspected of perverse exaggeration. But those who speak glibly of urban improvements during this period, or of the alleged rise in the standards of living, fight shy of the actual facts: they generously impute to the town as a whole benefits which only the more favored middle-class minority enjoyed; and they read into the original conditions those improvements which three generations of active legislation and massive sanitary engineering have finally brought about.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonoured.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“The masters of the underground citadel are committed to a 'war' they cannot bring to an end, with weapons whose ultimate effects they cannot control, for purposes that they cannot accomplish.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

“Anger makes good men stubborn and stubborn men petty.”
― Stuart Turton, The Devil and the Dark Water