Quotes About Peasants

He interprets the desires of the great peasant mass to be owners of land, owners of their means of production, of their animals, of all that which they have long yearned to call their own, of that which constitutes their life and will also serve as their cemetery.

Patton was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude.

What's missing from the literature of our species are the stories of the peasants. The filthy illiterate. Those with no firm address, no surname. No one to impress, nothing to lose. But the poor tell stories, too.

So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills—old Scribonius Libo in his toga prætexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants.

On a knoll in the marshes stand the ruins of an old croft-house. This knoll is perhaps only in a certain sense the work of nature; perhaps it is much rather the work of long dead peasants who built their homes there on the grassy bank by the brook, generation after generation, one on the other's ruins.

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

Well, you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're all fucking peasants As far as I can see

John Lennon once wrote: Well, you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're all fucking peasants As far as I can see

U.S. imperialism's avowed policy of sending soldiers to fight the revolutionary movement in any Latin American country, to kill workers, students, peasants, to kill Latin American men and women, has no other purpose than to maintain its monopolistic interests and the privileges of the treacherous oligarchies which support the monopolies.

Americans who had traveled in Europe knew the 'free' European peasants suffered considerably greater oppression and misery than did American bondsman. Modern scholarship has shown that the exploitation rate -- the percentage of the worker's production that was taken from him by his owners -- was lower among the slaves than among European peasants, that work loads were light, and that slaves actually experienced a considerable measure of personal freedom.

a real program of social and economic reform [in Vietnam] would have involved a real conflict ... between the peasants ... and the landlords and the city people... [it] was difficult ... because it required a concern for the peasants ... it was those capacities ... its American supporters lacked.

Durante tres años, la política de requisas iba a provocar miles de sublevaciones y de motines, que degeneraron en verdaderas guerras campesinas reprimidas con la mayor violencia.

As elsewhere, war forged Greeks out of peasants.

K recordings, Johnson felt, were "folk music, music made by peasants." The label had turned out exactly as Johnson had hoped.

It was in that year when the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifixion of peasant children, but a similar fate for their household animals, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me.

It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

Sweet Melinda The peasants call her the goddess of gloom.

By the end of that century, Europe saw an enormous shift as peasants left the countryside, cities expanded, and an industrial working class was formed.1 The German social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies described this as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or what is typically translated in English as "community" and "society."2

And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.

The latter class [peasants] is always unaffected by the course of historic events. Like cats who are attached to a house and not to the people who dwell in it, the poorer type of peasant belongs less to the nation than to the soil. Therefore, however numerous they are, they never constitute a danger for a conqueror.

The world seemed quite willing to accept misunderstood artists, misunderstood thieves, and even peasants who dreamed of royalty. But nobody knew what to do with a misunderstood philologist. Other than run him out of town for bringing the dragons down on them.

Still more confounding to the regime, rural conflict was turning out to be not class based but mostly generational and gender based; the regime indirectly admitted as much by complaining that what it called the middle and even poor peasants were "under the sway" of the kulaks.144

Notwithstanding such moments of comprehension as Kamenev displayed, the scope of the rural catastrophe was still clouded in Moscow by class-war idées fixes as the regime reflexively labeled the peasants' legitimate grievances "an uprising of kulaks, bandits, and deserters.

Whales are vocal, but they lack a political voice. They, too, are like tribal people, like peasants, natives, like the poor and most of us: underrepresented, rolled by the big money of strong-armed, weak-minded people who never grasp that they already have too much, who are politically connected yet so lethally out of touch with themselves and the world.