Quotes About Peasants

Peasants seldom write letters, and for my father the arrival of a letter was an important ceremony that entailed quite a ritual: the glass of wine for the postman, the close scrutiny of his name on the envelope—mistakes can happen, and you must never open a letter that isn't addressed to you—and then the blade of the knife carefully inserted to liberate whatever the fates had in store.

Indeed, in 1933 he refused to leave Freiburg to teach in Berlin, explaining that his 'philosophical work ... belongs right in the midst of the peasants' work'.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

the characters aren't the only ones stranded in their country retreat: Huysmans is stranded there, too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to Naturalism—the sordid Naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more abject and greedy even than Parisians—if not for the dream sequences, which interrupt and ultimately hobble the story, and make it so impossible to classify.

This is what your faith means, she told Miss Broadstairs silently. You can dress it up with cherubs if you wish, but the man who painted this picture was rather more honest. He knew that it all boils down to a threat to keep people in line. That sketchy promise of Heaven if you do what you're told – and the certainty of endless torture if you don't. Take that, peasants. Now back to the fields and don't even think about improving your lot.

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theaters, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread.

The peasants knew that a spoiled son did more harm to a family than a dead one, and they kept themselves from indulging him too much.

The communist rulers began to squeeze the peasants and farmers: the more prosperous among them were subjected to heavy taxes; the prices for grain were arbitrarily cut by 20 percent....

I heard so many stories from Gaomi's peasants that I had an irrepressible urge to write them down. Today, Gaomi's peasants know that they have become famous around the world through my writings, but I think they are a little puzzled by this.

The local legend is of some harried god turning all the snakes into stone so that he could get some peace from the peasants' pitiful petitioning.

Everywhere, despite all the sorrows from which our lives are woven, there will flash a glittering dream of joy, just like a brilliant carriage with gold trappings, fairytale steeds, sparkling windows which suddenly appears from nowhere and flashes past some wretched backwater village, which has never seen anything other than farm carts, and for a long time after the peasants remain standing, mouths agape and caps still doffed, although the wondrous carriage has long since passed from view

In everything the will of God, madam," said Chichikov with a sigh. "Against the divine wisdom it is not for us to rebel. Pray hand them over to me, Nastasia Petrovna." "Hand over whom?" "The dead peasants." "But how could I do that?" "Quite simply. Sell them to me, and I will give you some money in exchange." "But how am I to sell them to you? I scarcely understand what you mean. Am I to dig them up again from the ground?

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants, but debt is the money of slaves.

Public opinion has so far not been averse to the blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists, but it might look less kindly on the blackmailing of starving Polish peasants. Jews who lost family members during the Nazi holocaust might also take a jaundiced view of the WJRO's machinations. Claiming to be the legitimate heir of those who perished in order to appropriate their assets could easily be mistaken for grave-robbery.

There were no peasants doffing their hats here; no one was exempt from paying taxes; all men, in fact, were born equal.

There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

Tool lists from the fourteenth century indicate that pitchforks, spades, axes, plows, and harrows, which have teeth to break up soil, were widely used. Both plows and harrows could be pushed or pulled by peasants. However, during the Renaissance an increasing number of farms used horses for such tasks, as well as for pulling carts that would take surplus food to market in nearby towns.

Dans notre société, quelles sont les classes qui aiment le travail pour le travail ? Les paysans propriétaires, les petits bourgeois, qui les uns courbés sur leurs terres, les autres acoquinés dans leurs boutiques, se remuent comme la taupe dans sa galerie souterraine, et jamais ne se redressent pour regarder à loisir la nature.

Several thousand peasants were loaded at gunpoint onto lorries and deported hundreds of miles from their homes and then left without food or money to make their own way back.

Peasants live in a closed reality with a single, compact center of oppressive decision; the urban oppressed live in an expanding context in which the oppressive command center is plural and complex.

Ingrid shrugged...like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants.

Peasants farmed nine-tenths of arable land. Most allotments were cultivated by peasant households within a land commune, one of whose functions was to reallocate arable plots periodically in accordance with changes in family size and composition. (A German critic called periodic redistribution a device 'to ensure an equal right for everyone to die of starvation').