Irrigation System Quotes & Sayings

It is one thing to say with the prophet Amos, "Let justice roll down like mighty waters," and quite another to work out the irrigation system. — William Sloane Coffin

In the age of arms, a super warhead might be the most powerful for its destructiveness. In the age of farms, an irrigation system is most powerful, for it feeds lives. But how do you define power and advancement in the age of social engineering? It is the one that mimics human the best, isn't it? We don't need a warhead when there has been a drought. We don't point at our enemy with sprinklers. It is about evolving. (Douglas Parsley) — Alan Chains

Someday men will learn to irrigate and spread fertilizer instead of praying for fertility. — Warren Eyster

It is my experience both as an artist and as a teacher that when we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance. It is a little like opening the gate at the top of a field irrigation system. Once we remove the blocks, the flow moves in. — Julia Cameron

The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it's as solid as a wall. And they all look so gray, faces twitching, young men who've been turned into old men. It's a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they're the same men, really. It's an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it's not water the buckets carry. — Pat Barker

Irrigation, unscientifically conducted, would not give us such truly wonderful mathematical fitness [as we observe in the Martian canals] ... A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see-a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various department of our own public works. — Percival Lowell

Of all the works of civilization that interfere with the natural water distribution system, irrigation has been by far the most pervasive and powerful. — Al Gore

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ... what have the Romans ever done for us?
Brought peace! — Graham Chapman

Your topsoil's a disaster area - it's starved for nitrogen, it's been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet. — Peter S. Beagle