In a milieu of strangers, the people who witness one's actions, declarations, and professions usually have no knowledge of one's history, and no experience of similar actions, declarations, and professions in one's past; thus it becomes difficult for this audience to judge, by an external standard of experience with a particular person, whether he is to be believed or not in a given situation. The knowledge on which belief can be based is confined to the frame of the immediate situation. The arousal of belief therefore depends on how one behaves - talks, gestures, moves, dresses, listens - within the situation itself. Two people meet at a dinner party; one tells the other he has been depressed for weeks; to the degree the listener as audience can judge the truth of such statements only by the way the stranger enacts the feeling of depression, to the degree appearances like this have an "urban" quality. The city is a settlement in which such problems of enactment are most likely to arise as a matter of routine.

- From the chapter "Roles" in The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett