Quotes About Peasantry

We come from the future, essentially, because we have all these ideas about gender equality, sexual freedom, and these are not shared by the working class, the peasantry among whom we work.

"The revolution's decisive victory over tsarism" means the establishment of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.

To attempt to force them into a peonage of starvation and intimidated despair will be unsuccessful. They can be citizens of the highest type, or they can be an army driven by suffering and hatred to take what they need. On their future treatment will depend which course they will be forced to take.

As late as the twelfth century only the higher classes faithfully observed the Christian rites; while the old pagan ceremonies were still common among the peasantry. And even now the Saints of the Calendar are in some places only thinly disguised heathen deities and pagan rites and superstitions mingle with Christian observances.

Our political system responds to large donors, so politicians create benefits for the rich, who then reward the politicians who created them. How different is this from the symbiosis in the Middle Ages between a king and the nobility, elevating aristocrats who repressed the peasantry at the same time that they hailed their own magnanimity and rolled their eyes at the peasants' morals?

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;A breath can make them, as a breath has made;But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,When once destroy'd, can never be supplied.

These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity.

So spoke Grenouille the Great and, while the peasantry of scent danced and celebrated beneath him, he glided with wide-stretched wings down from his golden clouds, across the nocturnal fields of his soul, and home to his heart.