Peasantry Quotes - page 2

...I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. [...] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step. (Noam Chomsky)
After the turmoil in the Congress Party, he chose to retire to home town Anantpur, and devoted most of his time to agriculture, which had always been very dear to him, as he belonged to the peasantry family. For quite some time he remained in wilderness, and had been buying time for an appropriate opportunity to re-netter politics. View quote
Neelam Sanjiva Reddy
Because he did not care about his country, Lenin was prepared to promise everybody whatever they wanted without giving much thought to the future. The peasants wanted private land for their communes? Let them take it: eventually all the land will be confiscated and collectivized anyway. Until then, ‘looting the loot' will win over, or at least neutralize, the peasantry. The workers demand to run the factories? Even though ‘workers' control is a detestable syndico-anarchist slogan, there is no harm in granting their desires-for the time being. Once industries have been nationalized and subjected to general economic plan of production, ‘workers' control' will vanish of itself. View quote
Richard Pipes
It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system. View quote
Fredric Jameson
Partly from being a more scattered population, which leads to self-dependence - partly to their religious struggles having given an historical character to their ordinary remembrances, nourished by that family pride which loves to look back - there is more individuality among the Scotch than among any other peasantry. View quote
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant. View quote
Leon Trotsky
There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen. View quote
James A. Garfield
There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. View quote
James A. Garfield
The peasantry ... were the true philosophers of the modern world, the heirs to classical sages such as Seneca and Socrates. Only they knew how to live, precisely because they knew nothing much about anything else. View quote
Sarah Bakewell
Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce. View quote
Michel Foucault
To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition. But that certainly does not mean asceticism or self-mortification. Nor do I appreciate in the least the idealization of the "simple peasant life." I have almost a horror of it, and instead of submitting to it myself I want to drag out even the peasantry from it, not to urbanization, but to the spread of urban cultural facilities to rural areas. (Jawaharlal Nehru)
Comrades, the question of substituting a tax for grain requisitioning is primarily and mainly a political question for it is essentially a question of the attitude of the working class to the peasantry. View quote
Vladimir Lenin
Where markets were most highly developed, as under the mercantile system, they throve under the control of a centralized administration which fostered autarchy both in the household of the peasantry and in respect to national life. Regulation and markets, in effect, grew up together. View quote
Karl Polanyi
It is there that our leaders prefer a surrender to the British than to the peasantry. Can you point out any effort to organize the peasants or the labourers? No, they will not run the risk. There they lack. That is why I say they never meant a complete revolution. Through economic and administrative pressure they hoped to get a few more reforms, a few more concessions for the Indian capitalists. View quote
Bhagat Singh