“Cain is not the city and Abel is not the country; but the relationship between them also illuminates … the relationship between the city and the country. … The city was, from the day of its creation, incapable, because of the motives behind its construction, of any other destiny than that of killing the country, where God put man to enable him to life his life as best he could.”

Source: The Meaning of the City (1951), p. 8

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Jacques Ellul 125
French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarch… 1912–1994

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“In the country, Tolstoy could still see the possibility of men living a Christian life; in the cities he saw no such possibility. Cities had therefore to be uprooted and destroyed. The people had to get back to the soil.”

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Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 78
Context: Tolstoy deplored all the modern tendencies toward immense congregations of people in limited areas, on the ground that they were making more and more impossible the truly Christian life. In cities the rich find little restraint to their lusts, while the lusts of the poor are greater there than in the country, and they satisfy them up to the limit of their means. In the country, Tolstoy could still see the possibility of men living a Christian life; in the cities he saw no such possibility. Cities had therefore to be uprooted and destroyed. The people had to get back to the soil.

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“I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.”

Ibid., p. 367
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Gostava de estar no campo para poder gostar de estar na cidade.

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“He saw a lawyer killing a viper
On a dunghill hard, by his own stable
And the devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of
Cain and his brother, Abel.”

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