Cities and civilization

A great quote:

[C]ivilization . .  . is achieved because city dwellers . . . have smoothed the edges of private desire so as to fit, or at least work in with all the other city dwellers, without undue abrasion, without sharp edges forever nicking and wounding, each refining an individual capacity for those thousands of daily, instantaneous negotiations that keep crowded city life from being a constant brawl or ceaseless showing match.  When a city dweller has achieved that truly heightened sensitivity to others that allows for easy access, for self and others, through the clogged thoroughfares of urban existence, we call that smoothness urbane. . . . Through the several millennia of our Western culture, to be urbane has been a term of high praise precisely because cities are such difficult environments to make work.

-                     Bart Giamatti