Small Town Mentality Quotes

… the idiocy of rural life

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

A lot of people from Buffalo haven't even been outside of Buffalo. Probably 75% of Buffalo never even been in New York City. We just come from a different kind of place. You just have to be from there to kind of understand that.

I think there's a difference between somebody who grows up in Paris or London and goes to Los Angeles. But if you grow up in the green fields, and you rarely go into the city, you're so overprotected that when you do go to L.A., it's almost a bigger slap in the head.

I think that unless you grew up in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, you're sheltered.

When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change.

There were only two kinds of people in our town. ―The stupid and the stuck- ―The ones who are bound to stay or too dumb to go. Everyone else finds a way out.

Being born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in the very rural parts of Kansas led me to believe that everything was simple, everything made sense and that anything was possible.

The attitude among the people I knew was, 'Fleur wants to be a singer' but it was never, 'Go for it. You can do it.' Everyone was cynical because we'd never seen anyone where we came from do it.

Ontarians don't want to believe that they are small people. They want to believe that they're open and that they're inclusive - and I believe that they are.

You may be big in New York, but in Walters, Oklahoma, you're nobody.

I grew up in Pitman, New Jersey, which is a tiny 2-square-mile town near Philadelphia. Everyone knows each other there.

South Dakota, like a lot of rural states, small states, there are small cities with a very big work ethic, very common sense approach. That has certainly shaped me.

New York is just as provincial as anyone else.

For me to pretend I'm the keeper of the small town mentality or that's all I'm interested in is wrong.

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand a sense of the small-town mentality, small-town social politics.

I love Kentucky people, but you have to get on the inside before they accept you.

This is the city of the underdog champion, so they want to see the next person out of their city blowing up and making I feel like, man, Atlanta's a big city, but it's so small.

I grew up in such a small city, I had to be popular or I'd be dead. So I had to be popular!

I'm from a small town where everybody always has something to say - you shouldn't sing secular music, you shouldn't do this or do that. A ton of "shouldn'ts."

People in my village had this mindset that in big cities like New York, if you are lost or without directions, no one will help you. The first time I came here, I tried to make sure not to walk by myself, because it would be difficult for me if I got lost. But people will help you.

I wouldn't be in a huge hurry to go back to Kansas. It was just bizarre. There's a lot of very, very heavy set people who believe in whatever they were told, because they didn't seem to get out very much or be interested in leaving where they were. They just didn't seem that curious, and I find that a little hard to deal with.