Michael Pollan Quotes

Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.

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

[The congressman visited Boston.] We often wonder how things are made so cheap among the Yankees. Come here and you will see women doing men's work, and happy and cheerful as the day is long, and why not?

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

Urbanization in India is a slow but sure death for her villages and villagers.

I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer.

Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.

Deng Xiaoping made a calculation. He bet on demographics. What he knew was that China had this enormous population of young, underemployed people, people who he could move from the farms to the coast and put them to work in factories, and that would be the lifeblood of China's economy.

Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder.

A perennial problem that has faced the Scottish Highlands is that, time and again, too many of the more talented young people have had to move elsewhere - even abroad - through a lack of opportunities that should have been available.

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

People going into the cities for the opportunities and the towns are getting older, no young people.

Not every American belongs to the cognitive elite. Not every American is equipped by nature or nurture to accelerate into a Third Wave Information Age.

We must, by every reasonable means, import our people, not in one branch of industry, not merely as farmers, as tillers of the soil, but we must bring out of every kind of industry, must develop the minds of the people and their energies.

If you work, you should not be poor.

The rich world has lots of well-paying jobs and an aging population that cannot fill them. The poor world has desperate workers. But while goods and capital can easily cross borders, modern labor cannot.

So far, the United States knows nothing of the difficulties of over-population; and historic realities of a nature to hamper the free play of economic forces exist only in a very limited degree. Quite the reverse is true in Europe.

It is deeply to be deplored that the people should continue to stream into the over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts.

$5 a day was what Mr. Ford said, and Negroes came hundreds of miles to line up outside his employment offices.

As society has shifted from an agrarian to an urban structure, the joy and necessity of diligent, hard work have been neglected.

The key to a vibrant middle class is an abundance of jobs that pay enough so that workers can provide for themselves and their families, enjoy leisure time, save for retirement and pay for their children's education so they can grow up and earn even more than their parents.

It would be great if people returned to areas of the country that need talented people with good economic prospects. Our country would really benefit if those who went to elite universities, who started businesses, who started nonprofits, weren't just doing so on the coasts.

The factory work that lifted millions out of poverty in places like China and Vietnam probably did cost some workers in North Carolina and Wallonia their jobs.

Today we see the steady stream from the countryside to the city, deadly for the Volk. The cities swell ever larger, unnerving the Volk and destroying the threads which bind humanity to Nature; they attract adventurers and profiteers of all colours, thereby fostering racial chaos.

The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, andthe country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,--travel a whole day together,--looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor.