Rural America Quotes & Sayings

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him - but he was a good and faithful horse.
-Frank

From "Eulogy for a Percheron" in "The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems — Greg Seeley

Balancing our energy portfolio is a real chance to reduce energy bills, revitalize rural America, slow global warming and strengthen our energy security. — Tom Udall

And sometimes people don't realize that 90 percent of the persistent poverty counties are located in rural America. — Tom Vilsack

I focus on a simple message: when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice. And when elites commit to equality for many different groups but arrogantly dismiss "the dark rigidity of fundamentalist rural America,"6 this is a recipe for extreme alienation among working-class whites. Deriding "political correctness" becomes a way for less-privileged whites to express their fury at the snobbery of more-privileged whites. I don't like what this dynamic is doing to America. There are two reasons I think we have to try to replace it with a healthier one. The first is ethical: I am committed to social equality, not for some groups but for all groups. The second is strategic: the hidden injuries of class7 now have become visible in politics so polarized that our democracy is threatened. A few words — Joan C. Williams

More than half of America's rural counties are losing population and with it, political representation. — Tom Vilsack

Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues. — Dwight Yoakam

We have a unique opportunity to unite America, urban and rural, coastal and midwestern, red and blue, under the banner of a truly unifying national effort. We can start right now. — William J. Clinton

There is more potential for economic growth in rural America than at any time in decades. — Tom Vilsack

To keep farmers on the farm we must maintain a strong farm safety net, but we will also have to build a thriving companion economy to compliment production agriculture in rural America. — Tom Vilsack

The levels of poverty in 1933's rural America were unimaginable to us now. The 1933 Farm Bill, which introduced unprecedented government control over agriculture, was a reaction to the specific problems facing producers at that time. — Debbie Stabenow

If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers. For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Let us build a 21st-century rural economy of cutting-edge companies and technologies that lead us to energy and food security. Such an investment will revitalize rural America, re-establish our moral leadership on climate security and eliminate our addiction to foreign oil. — Tom Vilsack

In rural areas of America, there is a growing increase in poverty, homelessness and hunger. You cannot separate these factors from domestic violence ?- a mother with three kids and no financial security is going to stiffen her lip and take the abuse, because not only does she have nowhere else to go, she has three children depending on her for survival. — Blanche Lincoln

I come from a rural state. People drive 50, 100 miles to and from work every single day. That is true all over America. — Bernie Sanders

At the risk of quoting Mephistopheles I repeat: Welcome to hell. A hell erected and maintained by human-governments, and blessed by black robed judges. A hell that allows you to see your loved ones, but not to touch them. A hell situated in America's boondocks, hundreds of miles away from most families. A white, rural hell, where most of the captives are black and urban. It is an American way of death. — Mumia Abu-Jamal

Things are different now. A book I read said three things changed rural America: the breakup of the family farm; — George Hodgman

The Republicans did not set out to establish a strong national state or to facilitate the industrial revolution. They believed strongly in the American dream of hard work and upward mobility. They saw no contradiction between capital and labor, between wealth accumulation and equality. Even in the exigencies of war, they directed their legislation to their political base, the farmers and the small-town merchants. Their vision assumed the virtue of rural and small-town America. The majority of Republicans who enacted the legislation grew up on farms. Yet they created an industrial juggernaut that flung railroads across the continent and grew great cities from seaboard to seaboard that attracted thousands from those small towns and farms. These results must be counted among the most sterling examples of unintended consequences in American history.18 — David R. Goldfield

Over the past two years, the Obama Administration and USDA have worked to build a foundation for sustainable economic growth in rural America. At the center of our vision is an effort to increase domestic production and use of renewable energy. — Tom Vilsack

Teach for America recruits top recent college grads, young professionals, people we believe are the U.S.'s most promising future leaders, and asks them to commit two years to teach in high-need urban and rural communities. — Wendy Kopp

What she wouldn't have given for her father to see her - to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child - a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school - would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America. And — Margot Lee Shetterly

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution. — David Simon

We need a president who understands the contributions and values of rural America, a president who understands the men and women who are up at 5 a.m. every day to grow the food that we put on our tables. — John Salazar

I obviously disagree with the individuals who do not support rural America and do not support rural airports. Under their philosophy, maybe we shouldn't even be paving roads in rural America, because there are fewer people that drive on them. — Glenn Thompson

There are large cooperatives all across this country. Land O'Lakes is a $12 billion club functioning all across America. There are rural electric co-ops in 47 states. Ace Hardware is a cooperative. — Kent Conrad

I wish I could give you all the examples over the last two years as secretary of agriculture, where I hear people in rural America constantly being criticized, without any expression of appreciation for what they do do. — Tom Vilsack

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Make no mistake. This is a war on rural America ... It is chilling to watch people who joined the military to defend American citizens point rifles on American soil at American citizens and women and children. A sniper rifle is not due process. — Matt Shea

Democrats have laid out a program that, if adopted, would make us independent of Middle Eastern oil in ten years, and create a new economy especially for those in rural America. Our program invests in clean energy alternatives and provides energy assistance for those in need. — Jim Clyburn

At last, we arrived home. Indian Vale. The house my father had built that had become mine and that one day would be my daughter's, if she chose to stay in the area. She wouldn't, though. Why should she? The young people here moved somewhere else as fast as they could, and the old folks withered away and died. The factories vanished and the mines and mills sank into the ground, and in their places were erected fast food joints and furniture rental places and pawnshops. Sometimes I hear places like where I live called "Real America," and I know it rankles some folks - city folks, mostly - something awful, and I wish I could tell them it's only done out of politeness. That it's only people saying nice things about the dying. — Jason Miller

During which time I have experienced the satisfactions of working the land, building the soil, and making brown into green, I am beginning to believe that our new world that will open up after the war should be constructed round a repopulated rural America, so that a reasonably large proportion of the population shall participate in the culture of the earth. The trend is often in the opposite direction, even in peace. As things are now in America, country living is possible only for those who have either the talents and instincts of a true farmer or the means to live wherever they choose. — E.B. White

Inevitable pickup trucks complete with full gun racks,
chainsaws,
fishing poles,
and big, sneering dogs in the back,
line the streets and parking lots.
Meek murmur of autumn skies,
Ford and Chevy outfits to roll through town,
as people get ready for a long, gray, foggy winter,
big, four-wheel-drive pickups with snow blades attached,
the box loaded down,
with a high stack of cordwood topped by a huge elk carcass,
to go disheartened in the midst of wretched weather,
cold, raw, continually snowing. — Brian D'Ambrosio

Can you imagine the reaction of a British tabloid newspaper if they found a small school in rural England hosting a party like this? A party? In a school? With children present? Where marijuana is openly smoked? And comdoms are given away at the door?Imagine the headlines! How much would the Daily Mail hate this? How much would the Daily Mail love to hate this?! — Dave Gorman

Because my parents were American missionaries who sent me to public schools in rural Japan, I had to confront Hiroshima as a child. I was in the fourth grade - the only American in my class - when our teacher wrote the words "America" and "Atomic Bomb" in white chalk on the blackboard. All forty Japanese children turned around to stare at me. My country had done something unforgivable and I had to take responsibility for it, all by myself. I desperately wanted to dig a hole under my desk, to escape my classmates' mute disbelief and never have to face them again. — Linda Hoaglund

I will set big goals for this country as president - some so large that the technology to reach them does not yet exist.""I will recruit new teachers and make new investments in rural schools, we'll connect all of America to 21st century technology and telecommunications. — Barack Obama

In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns. — Katherine J. Cramer

History suggests that attempts to privatize Medicare by relying on private companies to offer Medicare benefits in rural America simply will not work. — Bennie Thompson

Rural communities in Africa, South Asia and Latin America are where the majority of hungry people are and the inequality that exists between women and men in these communities is holding back progress. — Dionne Warwick

Across the Atlantic, in the scattered, far-flung, rural settlements of colonial America, hospitality had become a central concern, and hostesses, like peacocks displaying their iridescent plumage, tried to outdo one another with their creative food displays. — Kate Christensen

A beautiful literary collection that tells of today's country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations. At times, with today's advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America's cities, but the variety of practices is enormous. The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice. — Abraham Verghese

It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America. — Dan Quayle

Don't ever forget where you came from--especially if you don't even know where you are going. — Sara Marie Hogg

Let us never forget the greatest untapped market for American enterprise is right here in America, in the inner cities, in the rural areas. — William J. Clinton

I thought if every teacher in every school in America--rural, village, city, township, church, public, or private, could inspire his pupils with all the power he had, if he could teach them as they had never been taught before to live, to work, to play, and to share, if he could put ambition into their brains and hearts, that would be a great way to make a generation of the greatest citizenry America ever had. — Jesse Stuart

My mother is American. I first went to school in America, and we came back when I was about six to rural Norfolk. In primary school, I was teased immediately and mercilessly. I probably dropped that accent within about 10 days. — Adam Rayner

President Obama's fight for rural America is personal. He was raised by a single mom and grandparents from Kansas. He hails from a farming state, Illinois. — Tom Vilsack

Jesus sent his Spirit to empower people to realize their potential, and that should be the model for all of us in doing missionary work (Acts 1:8). When confronting the desperate situations we find in third-world countries and in troubled urban and rural areas here in America, we must realize that our objective must be to empower people and challenge them to use their gifts and actualize their potential. We have to join with them in such a way so that, as you said a moment ago, when they succeed, they can say, We did it ourselves. — Shane Claiborne

Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament. — Sarah Hall

Growing up in a very rural and remote area in Colorado's San Luis Valley - one of the poorest counties in the United States - essentially created the framework of values from which I operate. I stand up for the little guy. I fight discrimination at all levels. I fight for an inclusive America. — Ken Salazar

disabilities. In colonial America, the settlement of a vast new rural society meant that early colonists put a premium on physical stamina. The early colonies tried to prevent the immigration of those who could not support themselves and would have to rely on state help. People with physical or mental disabilities who were potentially dependent could be deported, forced to return to England. — Joseph P. Shapiro

To drive a car in rural America is freedom. Before I had a car, I'd never seen a rock and roll show, I'd never seen a comic or a show. — Penn Jillette

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead ... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,
and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia. — Henry David Thoreau

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'. — Lin Biao

Edward Abbey said you must "brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." I already had a good start. As a teenager in rural Maine, after we came to America, I had learned hunting, fishing, and trapping in the wilderness. My Maine mentors had long ago taught me to make home brew. I owned a rifle, and I'd already built a log cabin. The rest should be easy. I thought I'd give it a shot. — Bernd Heinrich

Sixteen percent of our population is rural, but 40 percent of our military is rural. I don't believe that's because of a lack of opportunity in rural America. I believe that's because if you grow up in rural America, you know you can't just keep taking from the land. You've got to give something back. — Tom Vilsack

A common misconception is that the costs of health care are cheaper in rural America, when in fact the reality is that they are more expensive and more difficult to access. — Blanche Lincoln

Medicare debates in Congress should result in better Medicare benefits for all our nation's seniors. We're not asking for special treatment for rural America, just a fair deal. — Bennie Thompson

More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America with straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways. Its impact on the American economy-the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up-was beyond calculation. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

The idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images - of Holland and tulips, of rural America with windmill blades slowly turning, pumping water at the farm well ... But the windmills we are talking about today are not your grandmother's windmills. Each one is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Stature of Liberty, taller than a football field is long. — Lamar Alexander

The campus is an oasis, settled in an otherwise nondescript town in rural America. A place where the grain elevator and the railroad grew together. — Fritz Nordengren