Quotes About Peasants

Your Majesty, I took the liberty because I was so desirous of visiting alone with you for a few minutes before the rest of the other peasants arrived.

The fate of the universe didn't rest in the hands of the giants. It could be found in the littlest things. Anything done well was a worthy accomplishment, whether it be unwrapping arcane secrets or sweeping halls, raising kingdoms from the ocean or washing dishes. All tasks, great or small, were of equal importance in the end. Without peasants, there could be no kings. Without soldiers, there was no army.

The Pugachev rebellion,' the historian Nicholas Riasanovsky has noted, 'served to point out again, forcefully and tragically, the chasm between French philosophy and Russian reality.' The Pugachev rebellion has become enshrined in Russian history and folklore, revered by many peasants and radicals and deplored by the rest of society.

I]t's impossible to overestimate the need to maintain a healthy peasant class, as the basis of the national community. Many of our present evils have their origin exclusively in the imbalance between urban and rural populations. A solid group of small- and mid-scale farmers has always been the best protection against social disease.

Land ownership has never been a problem. People have access to land. The peasants cannot complain about land ownership.

For the Russian masses, the proletarians, knew for certain, and already saw during the war, and in part before their very eyes, that the peasants would soon be on their side.

Americans get fooled because we think we're trying to help the peasants down there in El Salvador, even though we're propping up that oppressive government, among the most brutal and militaristic in the world.

When you're talking about peasants and children - obviously I've got some experience dealing with children - when you deal with children they act out and the lash out.

I mixed with a lot of peasants, workers, artists and writers, all deprived of work. That's when I understood human beings have an instinct toward knowledge.

French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way.

In each territory, the dominant misl levied a rakhi (protection tax) on Sikh and non-Sikh peasants.

Royce Westmoreland stared at him with biting scorn. I despise hypocrisy, particularly when it is coated with holiness. May I ask for a specific example? Fat priests, Royce replied, with fat purses, who lecture staving peasants on the dangers of gluttony and the merits of poverty.

Your Majesty, I took the liberty because I was so desirous of visiting alone with you for a few minutes before the rest of the other peasants arrived.

Until that moment of utterance, every objective analysis of economic production in Egypt would have concluded that the pain of the peasants is a necessary, normal, even natural arrangement of labor—the cost of doing business.

The narrative knows the way in which hungry peasants, in need of food from the monopoly, will pay their money, then forfeit their cattle, and then finally give up their land, because Pharaoh leverages food in order to enhance his power. In the end, the peasants are so "happy" that they asked to be "owned":

The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.

If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries, then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until, and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an alternative to the system of sham political independence. All

He was no longer in Russia, he thought. He was in a tsarist dreamland, imported from the West and built by terrorized peasants. Florence called to him from the facades of the Baroque palaces, and, crossing the Moyka River, he dreamed of Venice. He wondered how many bodies lay beneath the ice. Thousands, he thought. Tens of thousands. No other city in the world concealed the horrors of its past more beautifully than St. Petersburg.

By putting themselves at the mercy of the village head-man, a peasant family improved its chances of benefiting from the regular redistribution of fields. Not infrequently, the headman would take the best fields for himself and his favorites. But that was a risk that peasants had to tolerate in order to enjoy the survival insurance

Another advantage enjoyed by small farmers in the Dark Ages arose from the adoption in the sixth century of new farming technology: the heavy plow, often mounted on wheels. Used in tandem with an improved harness that allowed peasants to employ multiple oxen, the new technology made it much easier to clear forested land in Northern Europe.19

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are *equipped.* Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we -- we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. ...You, running about playing at revolutions, playing little games, thinking you're important. You're just peasants, you'll never *do* anything.

They were simple, kindly peasants, almost as close to nature as the animals with which they journeyed... She wondered if, in the years to come, any remnant of the faith she preached would stay with them, and be of help to them in their troubles.

She wanted to talk about it, to tell the peasants in the fields and the nobles in their palashos—the cows in the pastures, the very birds in the air— that everything was nothing. It was a delightful thought because it meant (to Tess) that one was free to choose, or decline to choose, without shame or coercion. For someone who was nothing, anything was possible.

Herod did a masterful job of maintaining order on behalf of Rome. His reign ushered in an era of political stability among the Jews that had not been seen for centuries. He initiated a monumental building and public works project that employed tens of thousands of peasants and day laborers, permanently changing the physical landscape of Jerusalem. He built markets and theaters, palaces and ports, all modeled on the classical Hellenic style.