How rich our German life is compared to France or England: what an abundance of social types and customs with completely different origins... Germany is a world, whereas England and France, with their stereotypically divided three social classes, are but enlarged villages... what a stage for a Balzac.
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.
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.
As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.
One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.
In that sense, I became politicized because the people in the coal mining villages who were involved in the struggle knew why they were there. But they couldn't understand why some pop star from London would want to be there.
I am the son of peasants and I know what is happening in the villages. That is why I wanted to take revenge, and I regret nothing.
But the war on terror as I have repeatedly said in the past, and the Afghan people believe in it, in truth, is that the war on terror is not in the Afghan villages or homes. Its in the sanctuaries, it is in the training grounds, its in the motivation factors and the money that comes to it.
There was an insurgency under President Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. Egyptian police and soldiers fought weekly battles with Islamists in the sugarcane fields and thick reeds along the Nile in rural southern villages like Minya, Sohag, Enna and Assiout.
When I gave birth to my fourth child, I suffered from post partum hemorrhaging. I almost lost my life. I was lucky to be under the care of trained health care personnel. I started wondering then what was happening to women in rural villages.
People forget that there are villages and communities that are still speaking French all over Canada. I went to a bar and spoke with some French people there, and they were saying: 'I went to English school, but at home it was always French, and that's going to be the way it is for my kids.' It's important for them to keep that language alive.
One winter, I went to Erfoud to research trilobites and got to know the quarries, the dealers, and the remote mining villages. They are not easy places to visit, and this was a completely unknown corner of the world economy: children slaving away on desert cliffs to furnish wealthy collectors in San Francisco.
I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village.
I want to encourage more people in small villages to take up sports.
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
The public/private partnerships are taking various forms in India. It is individuals who are socially oriented are setting up schools. They're setting up colleges. They're setting up universities. They're setting up primary-education schools in the villages, particularly the villages their original families came from.
The Marianne Vos Route goes through the seven villages of Aalburg, where I grew up, and celebrates my World and Olympic titles with a number of benches along the route, where you can stop and rest your legs. You'll see the white windmill in Meeuwen and, in Babylonienbroek, a statue of the silver bike I rode to celebrate my Olympic track win.
I've been doing a lot of work on female rights, especially adolescent rights. I've been to a lot of schools where the UNICEF had set up villages in India, and it's an eye-opening experience.
I once drove a pair of horses from New York to Vicksburg, and to this day I can almost map out that country as I saw it then, with its hills and valleys, villages and rivers. Yes, I naturally attribute something of my success in railroad building to the interest I take in such things.
I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music.
For such a small country, Britain packs in an amazing diversity of landscapes: coastline, lakes, mountains, rolling countryside, villages and great cities.
If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements.
There is a huge sense of loneliness as people leave villages and move to cities. It's hard to find that human connection as you move away from where you started.
