Subsistence Quotes - Page 2

• For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.

  Kevin Bales

  Eye, Reality, World

  Kevin Bales (2005). “Understanding Global Slavery: A Reader”, p.4, Univ of California Press

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Real, Pride, Men

  9 Copy quote

• The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

  Thomas Malthus

  Men, Race, Population

  Thomas Malthus (2015). “An Essay on the Principle of Population and Other Writings”, p.90, Penguin UK

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mere physical growing up, mere mastery of the bare necessities of subsistence will not suffice to reproduce the life of the group. Deliberate effort and the taking of thoughtful pains are required.

  John Dewey

  Growing Up, Pain, Thoughtful

  John Dewey (2004). “Democracy and Education”, p.3, Courier Corporation

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things "things." It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Giving, Understanding, Doe

  Richard M. Weaver, Ted J. Smith (2000). “In defense of tradition: collected shorter writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963”, Liberty Fund Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What more degrades woman today than that she so often seeks marriage as a support? Why is the holy sacrament of love, the sanctity of the family state, so often prostituted and destroyed, but because marriage is entered upon as a necessity or a convenience? And what can so place marriage on its only true basis of mutual love, mutual fitness, mutual esteem, as for woman to make herself independent of it as a mere means of subsistence?

  Mary C. Ames

  Marriage, Mean, Independent

  5 Copy quote

• The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Summer, Education, Winter

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1523, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If the land was divided among all the inhabitants of a country, so that each of them possessed precisely the quantity necessary for his support, and nothing more; it is evident that all of them being equal, no one would work for another. Neither would any of them possess wherewith to pay another for his labour, for each person having only such a quantity of land as was necessary to produce a subsistence, would consume all he should gather, and would not have any thing to give in exchange for the labour of others.

  Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

  Country, Land, Giving

  "Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth". Book by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (§ 1), 1766.

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Gratitude, War, Men

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's letter to his brother Frank Oppenheimer (March 12, 1932), as quoted in "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections" edited by Alice Kimball Smith (p. 155), 1995.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence.

  Pope John Paul II

  People, Excess, Levels

  Pope John Paul II (1998). “In my own words”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.

  Karl Kraus

  Mean, Nuts, Feet

  20 Copy quote

• You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. 'But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?' 'Oh, no,' they'll say, 'We couldn't possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We'd be driven down to a bare subsistence level.'

  Milton Friedman

  Thinking, Should Have, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.

  Milton Friedman

  Jobs, Impossible Things, Promise

  23 Copy quote

• It is evident that the right of acquiring and possessing property, and having it protected, is one of the natural, inherent, and unalienable rights of man. Men have a sense of property: Property is necessary to their subsistence, and correspondent to their natural wants and desires; its security was one of the objects, that induced them to unite in society. No man would become a member of a community, in which he could not enjoy the fruits of his honest labour and industry.

  William Paterson

  Men, Rights, Community

  72 Copy quote

• And Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences, whether we consider its subjects as furnishing the principal subsistence of life to man and beast, delicious varieties for our tables, refreshments from our orchards, the adornments of our flower-borders, shade and perfume of our groves, materials for our buildings, or medicaments for our bodies.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Flower, Men, Body

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private : Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State”, p.390

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• For society as a whole, nothing comes as a "right" to which we are "entitled." Even bare subsistence has to be produced-and produced at a cost of heavy toil for much of human history. The only way anyone can have a right to something that has to be produced is to force someone else to produce it for him. The more things are provided as rights, the less the recipients have to work and the more others have to carry their load.

  Thomas Sowell

  Work, Rights, Historical

  Thomas Sowell (2011). “The Thomas Sowell Reader”, p.74, Basic Books

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the developing world, it's about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.

  Melinda Gates

  Past, Men, Agendas

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

  Thomas Malthus

  Science, Numbers, Population

  Thomas Robert Malthus (1959). “Population: The First Essay”, p.5, University of Michigan Press

  47 Copy quote

  Show source

• This subsistence, or manner of being of God is his one essence so far as it has personal properties.

  William Ames

  Essence, Property

  William Ames (1968). “The marrow of theology”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Most countries in Africa have the capacity to be great agricultural producers, but they do only subsistence production. So a family will produce for themselves and nothing more. Why? Because of the systems: The markets are not there to go beyond.

  Nicolas Berggruen

  Country, Capacity, Produce

  4 Copy quote

• Men, like animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the means of their subsistence.

  Adam Smith

  Mean, Animal, Men

  Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart (1843). “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, p.5

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

  John Stuart Mill

  Punishment, Giving, Criminals

  John Stuart Mill (1849). “Principles of political economy, with some of their applications to social philosophy”, p.541

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Creation differs from subsistence only as the first leap of a fountain differs from its continuance.

  Coventry Patmore

  Firsts, Creation, Fountain

  Coventry Patmore (2016). “The Rod, the Root and the Flower”, p.12, Lulu.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• If this labourer were in possession of his own means of production, and was satisfied to live as a labourer, he need not work beyond beyond the time necessary for the reproduction of his means of subsistence, say 8 hours a day.

  Karl Marx

  Mean, Needs, Hours

  Karl Marx (2012). “The Essential Marx”, p.108, Courier Corporation

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• The bourgeoisie's weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Running, Mean, Artist

  Quoted by Lloyd Osbourne in 'The Death of Stevenson', preface To Tusitala edition of Weir of Hermiston (published 1924).

  4 Copy quote

  Show source