Quotes
Abraham Lincoln
Before long the most valuable of all arts will be that of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of land.
Thomas Jefferson
“I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them”.
“Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.”
“Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.”
“Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.”
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny”.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense”.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
Edward Abbey
“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: that was the American dream”.
“High technology has done us one great service. It has taught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring”.
“How to overthrow the system: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it”.
“No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policeman, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets”.
