GLOBAL AGRICULTURE : Reflections
“ O fortunatos nimium, sua bona norint, Agricolas! “ (“O farmers excessively fortunate, if only they recognized their blessings!”)
--Roman poet Virgil (70 B.C.-19 B.C.), from “Georgics,” No. 2
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“Physically, there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farmyard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.”
--Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), from “Getting Married” (1911)
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“This country needs good farmers, good businessmen, good plumbers, good carpenters.” --Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994), from his farewell address after resigning the U.S. presidency, Aug. 9, 1974
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“Oh Goddess Earth, O all-enduring wide expanses!
Salutation to thee. Now I am going to begin cultivation. Be pleased, O virtuous one.”
--Ancient Sanskrit Text
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“The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity.”
--American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), from “Society and Solitude” (1870)
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“A farm is an irregular patch of nettles, bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn’t know enough to stay in the city.”
--American humorist S.J. Perelman (1904-1979), from “Acres and Pains” (1947)
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“Blessed be agriculture! if one does not have too much of it.”
--American editor and author Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), from “My Summer in a Garden” (1871)
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“The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings, he speculates in herds of cattle.”
--American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), from “Walden” (1854)
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“When the tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.”
--American statesman Daniel Webster, (1782-1852), from a speech entitled “Remarks on the Agriculture of England,” delivered at the Boston State House, Jan. 13, 1840)
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“No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.”
--American author and critic H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), from “What Is Going On in the World,” The American Mercury, November, 1933) Sources: “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,” 4th Edition; “The Harper Book of American Quotations”; “Seed to Civilization: The Story of Food” by Charles B. Heiser Jr. (1990); Compiled by Times Researcher LAURA A. GALLOWAY.