#peasant

The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn't like the country and never looks at it. ↗

— Jules Renard

#peasants #nature

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but. ↗

— John Berger

#becomes #connected #difficult #fond #glad

What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center. ↗

— Al Lewis

#center #garment #her #immigrant #life

I mean, my people were very, very simple. They were peasant people, you know? ↗

— James Earl Jones

#know #mean #peasant #people #simple

My parents were ignorant peasants from the Old World. ↗

— Maurice Sendak

#old #old world #parents #peasants #were

The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it. ↗

— Gertrude Stein

#duchess #earth #nothing #peasant #sees

And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play. ↗

— Émile Zola

#peasants #terre #vice #love

The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there. ↗

— Herman Gorter

#conditions #different #here #often #peasant

The revolution in Russia was terrible for the proletariat in the long years of its development and it is terrible now, after the victory. But at the actual time of revolution it was easy, and this was due to the peasants. ↗

— Herman Gorter

#after #development #due #easy #long

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

— Bill Mauldin

#attitude #dark #dark ages #him #i