Peasants Quotes - Page 6

• There were no "unemployed" in the impoverished Polish countryside before the Second World War. Not a single unemployed. Every child that was born in the peasant family had his room at the table and his job in the field, stable or pigsty... If there was not enough food, everybody got less. If food was plentiful, everybody ate better. In such a setting, we may say, the problem of security couldn't even arise... One was born with life-long rights; the only thing that one could not do was to change them. A setting good on the side of security, though bad on the side of freedom.

  Zygmunt Bauman

  Jobs, Children, War

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• Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on.

  Robert Hass

  Morning, War, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I doubt very much if Mao would ever command great respect from the intellectual élite of China, perhaps not entirely because he has an extraordinary mind, but because he has the personal habits of a peasant.

  Edgar Snow

  Doubt, Mind, Intellectual

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• The Bible affects everybody's life who is a Christian, from the middle class in Europe to the peasant in Africa and Asia. The Bible has affected their lives, but in translation, since they do not read the Bible in the original Greek or Hebrew.

  Ngugi wa Thiong'o

  Christian, Europe, Class

  Source: www.alternet.org

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• What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.

  Al Lewis

  Mom, Mother, Motivated

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• The prince and the peasant will not be equalized by cutting off the prince's head.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Cutting, Equality, Cutting Off

  Mahatma Gandhi, Rudrangshu Mukherjee (1993). “The Penguin Gandhi Reader”, p.254, Penguin Books India

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• All the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes people just want to feel different. And so long as Third World peasants are poor they will send us drugs, and as long as we are empty we will ask for this little plant.

  George Carlin

  Long, People, Drug

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• The time will come, when thou shalt lift thine eyes To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies. While aged peasants, too amazed for words, Stare at the flying fleets of wondrous birds.

  Thomas Gray

  Eye, Sky, Long

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• Peasants are a rude lot, and hard: life has hardened their hearts, but they are thick and awkward only in appearance; you have to know them. No one is more sensitive to what gives man the right to call himself a man: good-heartedness, bravery and virile brotherhood.

  Jacques Roumain

  Heart, Men, Giving

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• Hope, and fear. Twin forces that tugged at us first in one direction and then in another, and which was the stronger no one could say. Of the latter we never spoke, but it was always with us. Fear, constant companion of the peasant. Hunger, ever at hand to jog his elbow should he relax. Despair, ready to engulf him should he falter. Fear; fear of the dark future; fear of the sharpness of hunger; fear of the blackness of death.

  Kamala Markandaya

  Dark, One Direction, Hands

  Kamala Markandaya (2000). “Nectar in a sieve and related readings”

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• Every lord's mansion stands on the foundation of your bones, soldier, every field has been saturated with your sweat, and you, peasant, even if you worked your arms down to the stub, if you won a hundred battles, and faithfully gave the last drop of your blood for your country, you would always be a slave. There is no land for you, no heaven, no shelter, not even a doghouse where you could rest your poor head. You are the last before God and before people, the last one.

  Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

  Country, Blood, Land

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• Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.

  Carl L. Becker

  Virginia, Class, Southern

  "Search Results The United States: An Experiment in Democracy". Book by Carl L. Becker, 1920.

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• This priesthood became a closed group, able to control enormous wealth and incomes, and concerned very largely with the study of the solar and astronomical periodicities on which there influence was originally based. With the surplus thus created, the priesthood was able to command human labor in huge amounts and to direct this labor from the simple tillage of the peasant peoples to the diversified and specialized activities that constitute civilized living.

  Carroll Quigley

  Simple, Able, Groups

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• Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning, but the immediate consequence of perception. When philosophers have wearied themselves and their readers with their speculations upon this subject, they can neither strengthen this belief, nor weaken it; nor can they shew how it is produced. It puts the philosopher and the peasant upon a level; and neither of them can give any other reason for believing his senses, than that he finds it impossible for him to do otherwise.

  Thomas Reid

  Believe, Men, Giving

  Thomas Reid (1846). “The Works of Thomas Reid, D. D.: Now Fully Collected, with Selections from His Unpublished Letters”, p.309

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• I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Should, Workers, Spectators

  "Shostakovich: A Life". Book by Laurel Fay, p. 55, 2000.

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• Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.) Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type. I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.

  Bela Bartok

  Self, Creative, Tone

  "The Listening Composer". Book by George Perle, pp. 46-47, 1996.

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• The American farmer, whose holdings were not so extensive as those of the grandee nor so tiny as those of the peasant, whose psychology was Protestant and bourgeois, and whose politics were petty-capitalist rather than traditionalist, had no reason to share the social outlook of the rural classes of Europe. In Europe land was limited and dear, while labor was abundant and relatively cheap; in America the ratio between land and labor was inverted.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Europe, Land, Class

  "The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R". Book by Richard Hofstadter, Chapter I, part II, p. 44, 1955.

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• All the lessons learned, unlearned; The young, who learned to read, now blind, Their eyes with an archaic film; The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune, Following the donkey's bray; These only remember to forget. But somewhere some word presses, On the high door of a skull and in some corner, Of an irrefrangible eye, Some old man memory jumps to a child - Spark from the days of energy. And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

  Stephen Spender

  Children, Memories, Eye

  "Selected Poems (Fall of a City)". Book by Stephen Spender, 1941.

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• Academic Marxism is a fantasy world, and unctuous compassion-sweepstakes, into which real workers or peasants never penetrate.

  Camille Paglia

  Real, Compassion, World

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

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• The most important thing in my life, its leitmotif, has been the constant and close contacts with working people, with workers and peasants.

  Leonid Brezhnev

  People, Important, Contact

  Sputnik: Digest, p. 48, 1967.

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• On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer's prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou.

  Matthew Arnold

  Summer, Lonely, Gay

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.229, Delphi Classics

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• One may speak Latin and have but the mind of a peasant.

  John Lancaster Spalding

  Latin, Mind, May

  John Lancaster Spalding (1901). “Aphorisms and Reflections: Conduct, Culture and Religion”

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• Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet.

  Richard Dawkins

  Dark, Civilization, Hydrogen Bomb

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.98, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I remembered the way out suggested by a great princess when told that the peasants had no bread: "Well, let them eat cake".

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Princess, Cake, Bread

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1971). “The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”

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• It's the Democrats whose position is that the only problem in Washington, D.C., is the peasants aren't sending enough cash in for the king to spend.

  Grover Norquist

  Kings, Cash, Enough

  "One-on-one with Grover Norquist". "Meet the Press" with David Gregory, www.nbcnews.com. November 27, 2011.

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