Soil Quotes - Page 12

• Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil?

  Rachel Carson

  Healthy, Matter, Maintaining

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We are born on the same soil, breathe the same air, live on the same land, and why should we not be brothers and sisters?

  Nathan Bedford Forrest

  Brother, Air, Land

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• In the Middle West now you got to put a brand on your soil, then in the Spring go on a round-up looking for it.

  Will Rogers

  Spring, Agriculture, Goes On

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• The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men.

  John Muir

  Men, Rivers, Mountain

  John Muir (2015). “JOHN MUIR’S CALIFORNIA COLLECTION: My First Summer in the Sierra, Picturesque California, The Mountains of California, The Yosemite & Our National Parks (Illustrated): Adventure Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Nature Writings and Wilderness Essays”, p.216, e-artnow

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• The immediate need for education and practice in using our natural resources of soil, forest, water, wildlife and areas of inspirational beauty to the best advantage of all, for this generation and others to come, is again apparent to every observant citizen.

  Walt Disney

  Practice, Water, Generations

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• In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites.

  Bayard Taylor

  Afar, Emotion, Imagine

  Bayard Taylor (1855). “The Lands of the Saracen: Or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain”, p.84

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• A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Country, Tired, Cutting

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.3159, Simon and Schuster

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• It's as if the whole notion of growing soil is something only lunatics would think about. But why not grow soil? Does anything make more sense than growing soil? Isn't that more important than tractors, trucks, silos, barns, county fairs and country music? Of course it is. And yet to the lion's share of American farmers, the very notion of growing soil is just plain silly.

  Joel Salatin

  Country, Silly, Thinking

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• Since chemical fertilizer burns out the soil organic matter, other farmers struggle with tilth, water retention, and basic soil nutrients. The soil gets harder and harder every year as the chemicals burn out the organic matter, which gives the soil its sponginess. One pound of organic matter holds four pounds of water. The best drought protection any farmer can acquire is more soil organic matter.

  Joel Salatin

  Struggle, Years, Land

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• When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.

  Wendell Berry

  Husband, Wind, Land

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• When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.

  Michael Pollan

  Appreciation, Mistake, Ignorance

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• But we wish to give the Jews a Homeland. Not by dragging them ruthlessly out of their sustaining soil, but rather by removing them carefully, roots and all, to a better terrain.

  Theodor Herzl

  Roots, Giving, Wish

  Theodor Herzl (1960). “Herzl Speaks His Mind on Issues, Events, and Men”

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• The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil.

  Anne Lamott

  Rocks, Hands, Roots

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• But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.

  Wangari Maathai

  Erosion, Issues, Logging

  "I Will Disappear Into the Forest". Interview with Dave Gilson, www.motherjones.com. January 5, 2005.

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• The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Fate, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2009). “Walden”, p.3, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

  Annie Dillard

  Morning, Eden, Dust

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.28, Canongate Books

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• Knowledge exists potentially in the human soul like the seed in the soil; by learning the potential becomes actual.

  Al-Ghazali

  Soul, Humans, Seeds

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• The Jews who will it shall achieve their State. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.

  Theodor Herzl

  Home, Men, Greatness

  Theodor Herzl, Ludwig Lewisohn (1955). “Theodor Herzl: a portrait for this age”

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• My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

  Aldo Leopold

  Animal, Land, Water

  "A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There". Book by Aldo Leopold. Chapter "The Land Ethic", p. 203-204, 1949.

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• You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafTs.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Sex, Talking, Fake

  Ernest Hemingway (2016). “The Sun Also Rises”, p.58, Hamilton Books

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• The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas having their essence in their form; they are organic, living institutions transplanted from English soil. Their significance is vital, not formal; it is to be gathered not simply by taking the words and a dictionary, but by considering their origin and the line of their growth.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Government, Essence, Growth

  "Gompers v. United States, 233 U.S. 604, 610". Judicial opinion, 1914.

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• Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

  James Russell Lowell

  Fall, Government, Democracy

  William Makepeace Thackeray, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot (1910). “Essays, English and American: With Introductions and Notes”

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• There is new life in the soil for every man. There is healing in the trees for tired minds and for our overburdened spirits, there is strength in the hills, if only we will lift up our eyes. Remember that nature is your great restorer.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Nature, Healing, Tired

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• The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.

  Ludwig Boltzmann

  Struggle, Air, Water

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• Home economics should find its way into the curriculum of every school because the scientific study of a problem pertaining to food, shelter or clothing... raises manual labor that might be drudgery to the plane of intelligent effort that is always self-respecting...Home economics is not one department, in the sense in which dairying or entomology or soils is a department. It is not a single speciality... Many technical and educational departments will grow out of it as time goes on.

  Martha Van Rensselaer

  Educational, School, Home

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