“Knowledge is like the carrot, few know by looking at the green top that the best part, the orange part, is there. Like the carrot, if you don't work for it, it will wither away and rot. And finally, like the carrot, there are a great many donkeys and jackasses that are associated with it.”
Dan Keding, Elder Tales: stories of wisdom and courage from around the world (2008), ISBN 1591585945, p. 151
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Nasreddin 23
philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for … 1208–1284Related quotes

Letter to his wife, Olga Knipper Chekhov (April 20, 1904)
Letters
“You know who Carrot-Top should be married to in a movie? Gallagher.”
Radio From Hell (May 30, 2006)

“God, you are a big, ghoulish woman. I'm talking to you, Carrot Top.”
Flavor Flav Comedy Central Roast (2007)

“[on vegetarianism] I didn't climb to the top of the fuckin' food chain to eat carrots.”
They Call Me Tater Salad
“Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.”
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimun definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually—and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
“If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up.”
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