Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Agriculture seems to be the first pursuit of civilized man. It enables him to escape from the life of the savage, and wandering shepherd, into that of social man, gathered into fixed communities and surrounding himself with the comforts and blessings of neighborhood, country, and home. It is agriculture alone, that fixes men in stationary dwellings, in villages, in towns, and cities, and enables the work of civilizations, in all its branches, to go on.

The discovery of agriculture was the first big step toward a civilized life.

Industrial agriculture freed many people to pursue lives their parents and grandparents could never have. It made America modern.

No civilization worthy of the name has every been founded on any agricultural basis other than that of cereals.

[The plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden.... To be more concise, Rain follows the plow.

The best way to feed the world in 50 years is to grow food where most of us live—in cities.

These and other developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

The twentieth century was about getting around. The twenty-first century will be about staying in a place worth staying in.

It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

If agriculture goes wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right.

The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.

I see this [biodiesel] as a way for the farmer to grow fuel and food and put him back in business again

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

Everything has changed and we're all living in one city now. What happens somewhere affects things everywhere, so I have to be careful and whatever stories I work on, I want them to have redeeming moral values.

Alexander created cities everywhere he passed: I have left dreams everywhere I have trailed my life.

The farmers are the founders of civilization.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.

Divine nature gave us fields, human skill built our cities. -Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes

It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'

Agriculture is the greatest and fundamentally the most important of our industries. The cities are but the branches of the tree of national life, the roots of which go deeply into the land. We all flourish or decline with the farmer.

In the rush to industrialize farming, we've lost the understanding, implicit since the beginning of agriculture, that food is a process, a web of relationships, not an individual ingredient or commodity.