Agrarian Society Quotes

The big successful Communist revolutions occurred in poor agrarian societies–Russia in 1917 and China in 1949–not in industrialized societies, as Marx had predicted.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

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.

What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be "colonial".

The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be.

The biggest problem is integrating people from countries with Islamic agrarian cultures. They don't share with us the core values of modernity and think quite differently about relationships between women and men and individual responsibility.

I went to live on a kibbutz, and I'd idealized the world of collective, agrarian work, where everyone was equal, everyone contributed, that all this awful European intellectual stuff just fell away.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

Even in the early days of America when it was largely an agrarian or agricultural, farmer-type of economy. There were still cities; there were still elites.

Our society consists exclusively of free working people of cities and villages, workers, peasants, intelligentsia. Each of these strata may have its special interests and express them in numerous existing organizations.

Next to the pastoral came the agricultural life. When you add to that the manufacturing phase of development, society begins to fill out, and needs but wings to fly, and commerce is its wings.

I'm certainly not squeamish at all. The countryside makes you very aware of birth and death.

English country life is more like Chekhov than 'The Archers' or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.

The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.

[Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other.

There is a serious tendency towards capitalism among the well-to-do peasants. This tendency will become rampant if we in the slightest way neglect political work among the peasants during the co-operative movement and for a very long period after.

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.

After long centuries, agrarian civilization is weakening. Is sufficient attention being devoted to the arrangement and improvement of the life of the country people, whose inferior and at times miserable economic situation provokes the flight to the unhappy crowded conditions of the city outskirts, where neither employment nor housing awaits them?

Everyone knew at the time that the war was ultimately about slavery. After the war, some began saying that it was really about states’ rights, or a clash of two different cultures, or about the tariff, or about the industrializing North versus the agrarian South. All these interpretations came together to portray the Civil War as a collision of two noble civilizations from which black slaves had been airbrushed out.

Turkey's true master is the peasant.

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.

Let new India arise out of peasants' cottage, grasping the plough, out of huts, cobbler and sweeper.

Virtue, patriotism, or love of country, never was and never will be, till mens’ natures are changed a fixed, permanent principle and support of government. But in an agricultural country, a general possession of land…may be rendered perpetual, and the inequalities introduced by commerce, are too fluctuating to endanger government. An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.

Trade increases the wealth and glory of a country; but its real strength and stamina are to be looked for among the cultivators of the land.