Peasant Empowerment Quotes

It is the peasant, the true producer, who is also the true owner and master of Turkey.

What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.

You may rob the army of its commander-in-chief, but you cannot deprive the humblest peasant of his opinion.

When people were illiterate, they had to elect the lawyer or the doctor or whoever had access to information and knowledge to represent them in government. But today the peasant has more information than the politician ...

The workers and peasants must, as quickly as possible, seize everything that was created by them over many centuries and use it for their own interests.

More than purely economic measures are required [for the Russian peasant]. He must be granted the freedom of individual and personal initiative and the opportunity to intensify his productivity by hiring labor. He must have the right of free, unhampered cooperative association, with a voluntary--not as heretofore obligatory--membership, the right of free election to the administrative machinery --not appointment from above, as has been the practice all these years.

Confronting the disillusionment of the peasant at this time, when the sowing period is approaching, it is imperative for us to 'link' manufactured goods and grain at any cost. Above everything we have to show the peasant that he did not till and sow in vain.

The moment the cultivators of the soil realize their power, the evil of Zamindari will be sterilized.

The crime of liberation theology was that it takes the Gospels seriously. That's unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them . . . Liberation theology, in Brazil particularly, brought the actual Gospel to peasants. They said, let's read what the Gospels say, and try to act on the principles they describe. That was the major crime that set off the Reagan wars of terror.