Maize Quotes

During the past three years spectacular progress has been made in increasing wheat, rice, and maize production in several of the most populous developing countries of southern Asia, where widespread famine appeared inevitable only five years ago. (Norman Borlaug)
O Love what hours were thine and mine, In lands of palm and southern pine In lands of palm, of orange-blossom, Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine. View quote
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men. View quote
Chinua Achebe
That isn't true. Zimbabwe is the most highly developed country in Africa. After South Africa, I want to see another country as highly developed. [We have 14 universities and a literacy rate of over 90%, the highest in Africa. ] And yet they talk about us as a fragile state. We have a bumper harvest, not only maize, but also tobacco and many other crops. We are not a poor country. If anyone wants to call us fragile, they can. You can also call America fragile. View quote
Robert Mugabe
Today, the Italians have (hard) wheat foods like spaghetti and macaroni as their staple, while most Europeans use the potato. The Italians took the idea of the spaghetti-type foods from the Chinese noodle after Marco Polo returned from travels there, while Europe adopted the potato from American Indians. In neither case were Europeans enslaved before they could receive a benefit that was the logical heritage of all mankind, but Africans are to be told that the European slave trade developed us by bringing us maize and cassava. View quote
Walter Rodney
In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker's face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate. View quote
William S. Burroughs
As maize became important for human food worldwide, modern agricultural research on maize breeding continued the corn breeding begun thousands of years ago in the Central American highlands. View quote
Elizabeth Blackburn
Current evidence suggests that teosinte was first tended for its green ears and sugary pith by hunter-gatherers as an occasional rainy-season food in small "garden” populations away from its homeland, and not for its abundant grain-containing, hard fruitcases, which easily mass-collected but useless as food, are as yet unknown from the archeological record. A rare grain-liberating teosinte mutation (probably expressed in only one "founder” plant, a mazoid "Eve”), which exposed the encased grain for easy harvest, was soon recognized as useful, collected and planted (or self-planted). Thus maize was started on its way to a unique horticultural domestication that is not comparable to that of the temperate Old World mass-selected agricultural grains. View quote
Hugh Iltis
It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses. View quote
Barbara McClintock
The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have. View quote
Bill Gates
In return, US surpluses of genetically engineered maize (banned in the European Union) were being dumped on the horn of Africa, in the form of emergency aid. (Michel Chossudovsky)
A Song of the good green grass A song no more of the city streets A song of farms a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sundried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitchfork A song tasting of new wheat, and of freshhusk'd maize. View quote
Walt Whitman
Within a century or so after the discovery of America, more than fifty new foods had been carried back to the Old World, including maize, turkey, white potato, pumpkin, squash, the so-called Jerusalem artichoke, avocado, chocolate, and several kinds of beans. (Potatoes and maize now rank second and third in total tonnage of the world's crops, behind rice but ahead of what is probably man's oldest cultivated grain, wheat.) The European has turned for relief to drugs and pharmaceuticals the Indians discovered: quinine, ephedrine, novocaine, curare, ipecac, and witch hazel. View quote
Peter Farb