Great Agricultural Quotes & Sayings

Under the discipline of unity, knowledge and morality come together. No longer can we have that paltry 'objective' knowledge so prized by the academic specialists. To know anything at all becomes a moral predicament. Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had 'one great subject,' Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, What can I do with what I know? without at the same time asking, How can I be responsible for what I know? — Wendell Berry

Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world - and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem erfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them. — Michael Pollan

I had a God who knew my every desire. He also knew how I would fall. And yet he was waiting on the other side of my failure and my shattered dreams with some dreams of his own ... — Eric Ludy

Of course, someday we will beat the Tyranni. It is fairly inevitable. They can't rule forever. No one can. They'll grow soft and lazy. They will intermarry and lose much of their separate traditions. They will become corrupt. But it may
take centuries, because history doesn't hurry. And when those centuries have passed, we will still all be agricultural worlds with no industrial or scientific heritage to speak of, while our neighbors on all sides, those not under Tyrannian control, will be strong and urbanized. The Kingdoms will be semicolonial areas forever. They will never catch up, and we will be merely observers in the great drama of human advance. — Isaac Asimov

The first plague-spot is the accumulation of wealth in few hands, and the selfish withdrawal of its possessors from the life of the community. In an agricultural society like that of Judah, that clotting of wealth took the shape of 'land-grabbing,' and of evicting the small proprietors. We see it in more virulent forms in our great commercial centres, where the big men often become big by crushing out the little ones, and denude themselves of responsibility to the community in proportion as they clothe themselves with wealth. Wherever wealth is thus congested, and its obligations ignored by selfish indulgence, the seeds are sown which will spring up one day in 'anarchism.' A man need not be a prophet to have it whispered in his ear, as Isaiah had, that the end of selfish capitalism is a convulsion in which 'many houses shall be desolate,' and many fields barren. — Alexander MacLaren

Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred. Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. — Yuval Noah Harari

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

A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by an ruin her. — Angela Flournoy

Agriculture probably required a far greater discipline than did any form of food collecting. Seeds had to be planted at certain seasons, some protection had to be given to the growing plants and animals, harvests had to be reaped, stored and divided. Thus, we might argue that it was neither leisure time nor a sedentary existence but the more rigorous demands associated with an agricultural way of life that led to great cultural changes. — Charles Heiser

Much of the drive for Roman conquests, Montgomery argues, was fueled by poor agricultural practices that were whittling away the productivity of the empire's cultivated areas. Montgomery hypothesizes that exhaustion and erosion of the soil was a major factor in the fall of most once great civilizations, including the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Mayans. — Nicolette Hahn Niman

Posthumous men-myself, for example-are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood-hence our authority. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Urban planner and historian Lewis Mumford, though no Marxist, could see how the vast gulf between the promise of technological progress and its capitalist application was a glaring contradiction at the heart of the system: "Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture and new agricultural implements which promised crops so big that all men might be fed - the very instruments that were to give the whole community the basis of a good life, turned out, for the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of torture. — Paul D'Amato

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush. — T.H. White

I survived schizophrenia. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The poor are very well off, at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live! — Benjamin Disraeli

But here lies the rub: she's all I think about. She's the only person I want to spend time with. I'm fascinated by every little thing she does. And the fact of the matter is, I'm in love with her. Heartbreakingly, soul-wrenchingly, earth-shatteringly in love with her. It's nothing like I've ever felt before. And I need her to love me back more than I need to take my next breath. I can't imagine a greater agony than this big, pulsing, fierce love I have for her being unreciprocated. I would rather take a hundred blows to the head out on the field, suffer a thousand concussions, than not have her beside me for the rest of my life. — L. H. Cosway

Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity. They told a tale of progress fuelled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people. Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature's secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers. — Yuval Noah Harari

They all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times; they give chief employment to the newspapers, and therefore have most of them under their command. The agricultural interest is dispersed over a great extent of country, have little means of intercommunication with each other, and feeling their own strength and will, are conscious that a single exertion of these will at any time crush the machinations against their government. Jefferson — Jon Meacham

Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies, the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca's day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real-estate developments. — P. J. O'Rourke

There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress. — Joseph Addison

The spectacle of this lovely nation, with its great agricultural wealth and its cultural riches , continually stepping on its own toes, made me wonder if France suffered a kind of national neurosis — Julia Child

If you look at the carrying capacity of agricultural areas throughout the world, their ecological habitats are changing. So I think we're looking at - in our lifetime - great collapses of food services. — Dan Barber

He who has no faith in others shall find no faith in them. — Laozi

Nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular) — Dorothy L. Sayers

The wealth of south Florida, but even more important, the meaning and significance of south Florida lies in the black muck of the Everglades and the inevitable development of this country to be the great tropic agricultural center of the world. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas

His education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, plowman or farmer's boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use words as 'man' or 'woman.' He preferred to write about 'vocational groups,' 'elements,' 'classes' and 'populations:' for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. — C.S. Lewis

We heard stories about fakery and decoys at revivals. I never personally saw any trickery. — Kathie Lee Gifford

Work as we know it now is a very recent historical development. It didn't exist before the great agricultural revolutions that made intensive farming possible about twelve thousand years ago. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

As one of the nation's top agricultural states, Nebraska has a great opportunity to provide input that will help shape the 2007 Farm Bill, .. This legislation will help determine commodity price supports, priorities with regard to conservation programs, as well as rural development, renewable energy and beginning farmer initiatives for several years to come. — Dave Heineman

The two climbers looked at each other, a glance that bored all the way down to Medvetz's DNA - not desperate or pleading or frightened but resolved, almost at peace. Here were two men, united in their obsessive enterprise, their trajectories intersecting for just an instant, but an instant that contained some fundamental understanding: the long journey full of failures and setbacks, injuries and disfigurement and pain, propelled by a commitment beyond reason. Here were two men in this inhospitable place, the wind raking across the ridge, the shadows lengthening - one departing his life, the other walking back into it.
"God bless you," Medvetz murmured. "Good-bye."
And then he faced down the mountain and resumed lumbering along the route, toward Brice and Brett Merrell and Mogens Jensen and all the others waiting for him in the world below. — Nick Heil

In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward. — Rose George

Sara Scherr and Jeff McNeely have given us a thoughtful, sensible book about a topic of great importance to the world. There is no food security, no poverty reduction, no environmental sustainability without transforming our agricultural practices. The book ?presents well documented cases of best practices from all over the world. It should be required reading for all concerned with agriculture, the environment, food security or just the future of our children. — Ismail Serageldin

I've put on a lot of weight ... I only weighed six and a half pounds when I was born. — Red Skelton

The early 1990s was a time of great advancements in precooked bacon technology. Pork producers, food labs, and agricultural schools such as Iowa State University began investing substantially in precooked R&D. — David Sax

The great interests of an agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing nation are so linked in union together that no permanent cause of prosperity to one of them can operate without extending its influence to the others. All these interests are alike under the protecting power of the legislative authority, and the duties of the representative bodies are to conciliate them in harmony together. — John Quincy Adams

You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another. — Moses

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature. — Trofim Lysenko

We can't hold on to the past and let it influence what's best for us. — Christine Brae

All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration. — Albert Howard