“The Major was a courteous man, judicious and sensible, but he doubted the fighting efficiency of the South Essex would be improved by a campaign to improve its manners.”

On the Agriculture of England (1840)
Context: Is it practicable, on the soil and in the climate of Massachusetts, to pursue a succession of crops? I cannot question it; and I have entire confidence in the improvements to our husbandry, and the other great advantages, which would accrue from judicious rotation of products. The capacities of the soil of Massachusetts are undoubted. One hundred bushels of corn to an acre have been repeatedly produced, and other crops in like abundance. But this will not effect the proper ends of a judicious and profitable agriculture, unless we can so manage our husbandry that, by a judicious and proper succession of the crops, land will not only be restored after an exhausting crop, but gradually enriched by cultivation.

Whilst composing Also Sprach Zarthustra, Strauss made this joke about the Bavaria weather to his friend, the conductor Max von Schillings. Quoted in Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss - an intimate portrait, page 73.
Other sources

Source: Notebook

May 15, 2000, ESCWA Team of Experts Meeting, Amman, Jordan.

Ch 23
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux

16 September 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/24608868849
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)
Context: Because machines could be made progressively more and more efficient, Western man came to believe that men and societies would automatically register a corresponding moral and spiritual improvement. Attention and allegiance came to be paid, not to Eternity, but to the Utopian future. External circumstances came to be regarded as more important than states of mind about external circumstances, and the end of human life was held to be action, with contemplation as a means to that end. These false and historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life. And so effective has been the propaganda that even professing Christians accept the heresy unquestioningly and are quite unconscious of its complete incompatibility with their own or anybody else’s religion.

Sportsman Gurbachan Singh Randhawa in page=69