“Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.”
“When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.”
“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, the emptiness of ages in his face, and on his back the burden of the world.”
“There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable.”
“Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.”
“The master's eye is the best fertilizer.”
“No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.”
“Like a gardener I believe what goes down must come up.”
“The land too poor for any other crop, is best for raising men.”
“The farmer works the soil. The agriculturalist works the farmer.”
“Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.”
“A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.”
“Farmers only worry during the growing season, but towns people worry all the time.”
“It is thus with farming, if you do one thing late, you will be late in all your work.”
“Life on a farm is a school of patience; you can't hurry the crops or make an ox in two days.”
“The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.”
“There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.”
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.”
“Farmers are philosophical. They have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts.”
“There is no gilding of setting sun or glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers wives.”
“The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.”
“I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.”
“Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.”
“With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.”
“I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman's cares.”
“Farm policy, although it's complex, can be explained. What it can't be is believed. No cheating spouse, no teen with a wrecked family car, no mayor of Washington, D.C., videotaped in flagrant has ever come up with anything as farfetched as U.S. farm policy.”
“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.”
“By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”
“He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted -- and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.”
“It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.”