Quotes About Peasants

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

They had to pay taxes on fruit trees whether or not they bore fruit, Gorbachev remembered, "so peasants cut down their orchards.

I eat leftover caviar by hand, with baked potato, like peasants.

But the propaganda accompanying collectivization placed emphasis on the elimination of rural "exploiters," to divert attention from the fact that by far the most numerous victims of collectivization were ordinary peasants.

American exports reduced the cost of food in Europe faster than at any time since the Neolithic era. European peasants could not compete with cheap American grain and meat. Forced off the land, many of them immigrated to the United States. Some became American farmers; more became American workers.16

His profession makes him feel like boss of a creation; when he sets foot dirtside he is slumming among the peasants. As for his sartorial inelegance, a man who is in uniform nine-tenths of the time and is more used to deep space than to civilization can hardly be expected to know how to dress properly.

His profession makes him feel like boss of all creation; when he sets foot dirtside he is slumming among the peasants. As for his sartorial inelegance, a man who is in uniform nine-tenths of the time and is more used to deep space than to civilization can hardly be expected to know how to dress properly.

Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy…."11

The fact that a brush is depicted in the Party emblem together with a hammer and sickle clearly shows that our party defines intellectuals as an integral part along with workers and peasants. It was our Party alone which regarded intellectuals as a part of the main revolutionary force from the first days of revolution and depicted a brush in its emblem along with a hammer and a sickle.

Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.

Yes, peasants," he repeated slowly. "The lowliest of the low among humans." Then he enunciated, "Exceedingly backward and vulgar hillbillies." "Been called worse, mister." At his raised brows, she exhaled impatiently. "Bootlegger, moonshiner, Elly May Clampett, mountain mama, redneck, backwoods Bessie, hick, trailer trash, yokel, and, more recently, death-row con." "No references to mining? I'm disappointed.

What you are doing is something unprecedented in China and the world. Three hundred million peasants, one-sixth of the world's population, must liberate themselves from thirty centuries of feudal landlord domination. Smashing the landlords' economic power means smashing their political power. Only that can make secure the power of the people.

Peasants were worried about the future not just because they had more cause for worry, but also because they could do something about it.

In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and

Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. An

Cooperation' sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been geared towards oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the burgeoning cooperation networks with their precious food surpluses, despairing when the tax collector wiped out an entire year of hard labour with a single stroke of his imperial pen. The famed Roman amphitheatres were often built by slaves so that wealthy and idle Romans

The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future economic security they so craved through their hard work in the present. Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants' surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. These

Peasants had to work harder than foragers to eke out less varied and nutritious food, and they were far more exposed to disease and exploitation.

Wasn't it a puzzle? I'd grown up among peasants, yet it took a great house to teach me hunger.

The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.

To judge from all Communist papers, magazines and brochures, and from all public assemblies, one might even surmise that a revolt of the poor peasants in Western Europe might break out at any moment!

Because in Russia you were able to triumph with the help of a large class of poor peasants, you represent things in such a way, as if we in Western Europe are also going to have that help.

Stalin's championship of the "Uralo-Siberian method of grain procurement," as he himself later called it, has rightly been described as a great turning-point in Russian history, since "it upset once and for all the delicate psychological balance upon which the relations between party and peasants rested. . . ."[

The prescribed harsh emergency measures, reminiscent of War Communism's forcible grain requisitions, would predictably stimulate greater peasant recalcitrance the next time around, which in turn would stimulate and justify more radical measures culminating in the mass collectivization campaign on which Stalin's sights were set; and so it went in reality in 1928–29.