Daily Inspiration Quote by Ernest Poole

A single sneer hides inside that phrase: "those people". Poole draws a line not just between city and countryside, but between a class that gets to declare what counts as "best" and everyone else who has to live under that verdict. The sentence works because it treats metropolitan certainty as a kind of provincialism of its own: the city dweller, so proud of sophistication, is revealed as parochial in a different direction, unable to imagine value that isn't stamped with an urban address.

Poole's "It is not so" is doing heavy lifting. It's blunt, almost Biblical in its finality, a hard stop against the machinery of modern prestige. He doesn't bother to itemize the "best things" because the reader is meant to feel how ridiculous the assumption is before it can even be debated. The vagueness is strategic: it opens the argument beyond artisanal goods or scenic landscapes into a broader critique of cultural centralization - where art, opportunity, taste, even moral authority are presumed to originate in hubs and trickle outward.

Context matters. Writing in an America rapidly urbanizing and industrializing, Poole was surrounded by a new mythology: cities as engines of progress, rural life as backward. His line pushes back against that modernist narrative without romanticizing the country outright. It's less "the farm is purer" than "your scoreboard is rigged". The real target is the arrogance of cultural gatekeeping - a reminder that "best" is often just shorthand for "closest to where we are."