Quotes about acre

A collection of quotes on the topic of acre, land, landing, man.

Quotes about acre

“We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Soul, Nature

“As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.”

John Donne The Canonization

The Canonization, stanza 4

“There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
Context: Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.

War, Reading

“I spent five and a half years in prison. The worst part was coming home and finding out Green Acres had been cancelled. What the hell was I fighting for?”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Comedy sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien http://www.nbc.com/nbc/Late_Night_with_Conan_O'Brien/celebritysecrets/mccain.shtml (2000) <br class="br">2000s

Home, Hell, Fight, Parting

“The ambition for broad acres leads to poor farming, even with men of energy. I scarcely ever knew a mammoth farm to sustain itself; much less to return a profit upon the outlay. I have more than once known a man to spend a respectable fortune upon one; fail and leave it; and then some man of more modest aims, get a small fraction of the ground, and make a good living upon it. Mammoth farms are like tools or weapons, which are too heavy to be handled. Ere long they are thrown aside, at a great loss.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

Men, Loss

“There are more acres of forest land in America today than when Columbus discovered the continent in 1492.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

See, I Told You So
Atria
1993-11-01
chapter 14
171
978-0671871208
93086342
29250177
1447014M
Later version of his claim: Do you know we have more acreage of forest land in the United States today than we did at the time the Constitution was written?
The Rush Limbaugh Show
1994-02-18
Radio, quoted in [The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, New Press, 1995-05-01, 18, 156584260X, 31782620]

“Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Falsely attributed to Darwin, but actually from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) by Thomas Dixon, page 134 http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/c/11773-the-clansman-by-thomas-dixon?start=133. <br class="br">Misattributed

Lie, World, Dreams, History

“The question is not put how far extends
His piety, but what he yearly spends;
Quick, to the business; how he lives and eats;
How largely gives; how splendidly he treats;
How many thousand acres feed his sheep;
What are his rents; what servants does he keep?
The account is soon cast up; the judges rate
Our credit in the court by our estate.”

Juvenal book Satires

III, lines 234-242, John Dryden, trans.
Satires, Satire III

Question, Business

“Here they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by Abraham.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)
Context: March 1, 1830, Abraham having just completed his twenty-first year, his father and family, with the families of the two daughters and sons-in-law of his stepmother, left the old homestead in Indiana and came to Illinois.... Here they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by Abraham.<!--pp. 11-12

“If I had not been defeated in Acre against Jezzar Pasha of Turk. I would conquer all of the East”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“To have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book Black Reconstruction

Source: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 602

World, Family, Democracy

“Somewhere in the desert, there's a forest And an acre before us But I don't know where to begin <br/”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Death with Dignity"
Lyrics, Carrie and Lowell (2015)

“I mean you ACRES of harm,' Dalrymple growled. 'Untold QUANTITIES of harm. I will visit a whole CONTINENT of harm upon you before we are through.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Mortal Coil

“Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?”

Chuck Palahniuk book Choke

Source: Choke

Time, Future

“For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Success

“Industry is the vis motrix of husbandry, and therefore an ancient English writer observes, "that a single uncultivated acre is a real physical evil in any state."”

Walter Harte (1709–1774) poet and historian

Source: Essays on Husbandry (1764), p. 12.

Evil

“The flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea at Acre is not similar to the flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea in Spain.”

Rashi (1040–1105) French rabbi and commentator

Commenting on Gen. 1:10; why does it say "seas", not "sea" - because the nature of the sea varies from place to place.
Commentary on Genesis

Fish, Sea

“…it all happened so quickly you got a lot of bewilderment; you get a lot of people who are basically meat-and-three-veg quarter-acre New Zealanders who find themselves eating dim sims with chopsticks and they can't cope.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Referring to the reforms of the 1980s.
Source: New Zealand Wit & Wisdom (1998), p. 156.

People

“It's no more daunting in there than in a Georgian drawing room. You sit on a supremely comfortable chair- it'd be even better if it were a wingback, I'm surprised it's not- overlooking acres of leather and wood. You're never tempted, as you are in a Maybach, to push a button just to find out what it does. And then having to spend the rest of the journey trying to find which button undoes whatever the first button did. This makes for a hugely relaxing drive. So relaxing, in fact, that you sometimes forget that you're in a car. I did.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Rolls-Royce, p. 25
I Know You Got Soul (2004)

Cars, Drawing, Forgetting

“Right now I could take you in my jeep for a ride of any 25 miles through the streets of Hamburg and pay you dollar for every undamaged house you could point out. I don’t believe I would lose a five dollar bill in doing so. There is acre after acre of nothing but bricks and rubble. Particularly in the port and manufacturing area do you see nothing but twisted steel and shattered walls and broken bricks.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

Broadcast from liberated Hamburg (1945)

Housing

“The human eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure colour: the moors in the purple heyday of heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.”

Flora Thompson book Lark Rise

Source: Lark Rise, ch. 15, Harvest Home

Love, Beauty, Future, Sea

“From the beginning I could not believe that the “efficient market” hypothesis was dependent on a pure Brownian motion white noise or any truly random random walk. Place a minuscule colloidal molecule on a horizontal table that covers unlimited acres. Bombard it from every direction with thousands of minute atoms; and then if you wait long enough that original molecule can have traveled a billion miles in one direction. That’s truly a random Bachelier-Einstein walk, but not my notion of economic fluctuations.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

New millennium, An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory, 2009

Travel, Waiting, Dependency

“I wrote the Light of What We Know here..(at Yaddo), over several long stays. I'm not sure where I would have written it otherwise. I've been homeless since 2007, all my few possessions put into storage before I set off to travel across Europe and Asia. My journey was interrupted because of the deaths of loved ones and it was within the interruption that I began and finished writing the novel. Yaddo, I was told, might be a good place to write. … Yaddo turned out to suit me perfectly. A stately home—not English privilege but a Scooby Doo mansion—with woodlands, three lakes and magical charm, this charitable foundation has for a hundred years been host to giants such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath and Truman Capote. I'm still homeless and have yet to resume my broken travels, but wherever I go, I know that Yaddo and its 400-acre stretch of God's own country was always a kind of home to me and helped to nurture In the Light of What We Know.”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

"Sweet Inspiration - Writing and Travel", April 4, 2015 Sweet Inspiration - Writing and Travel http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/themes/67591492/Sweet-inspiration-Writing-and-travel April 4, 2015. Retrieved on 2015-04-05.

Love, Death, God, Travel

“No.3 Commando was very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow, so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and said don't spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion.
So Col. Durnford-Slater DSO said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree?. Yes, sir, 75lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.
And when Col. D Slater DSO had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don't want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.
Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. DS DSO said you will see that tree fall flat at just the angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.
So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole young plantation.
And the subaltern said Sir, I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ not 75. Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every pane of glass in the building was broken.
So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry and ran to hide his emotions in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosened by the explosion, fell on his head.
This is quite true.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Letter to his wife (31 May 1942)

Disappointment, Mathematics, Tree, Silence

“One theory is that the antichrist will be a major political leader in the United Nations and the “many” referred to is the UN. Another theory is that the “many” refers to the Arab League of Nations since their mosques are now on the temple mount where the temple needs to go. Many believe there is room to put the temple on a ten-acre plot north of the two mosques. The temple mount is about 37 acres. Keep an eye out for a treaty that allows Israel to rebuild the temple! If one is made, start the clock ticking again for that final week! It may be the Muslims will offer to trade the Jews ten acres on the temple mount to build their temple, for the entire West Bank? Plus five gazillion dollars! Israel wants that spot bad enough to pay any price. We’ll see.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 101

“This setting down and folding our arms, and waiting for sumthing tew turn up, iz just about az rich a speckulashun az going out into a four hundred acre lot, setting down on a sharp stone, with a pail between our knees, and waiting for a cow tew back up and be milked.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Waiting

“Cleon hath a million acres,— ne’er a one have I;
Cleon dwelleth in a palace, — in a cottage I.”

Charles Mackay (1814–1889) British writer

"Cleon and I".
Legends of the Isles and Other Poems (1851)

“There is another little tax called the increment tax. For the future what will happen? We mean to value all the land in the kingdom. And here you can draw no distinction between agricultural land and other land, for the simple reason that East and West Ham was agricultural land a few years ago. And if land goes up in the future by hundreds and thousands an acre through the efforts of the community, the community will get 20 per cent. of that increment.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 147.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Communication, Effort, Future, Drawing

“It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed, articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,— honour to them; they, in spite of the idle and the dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage; speakable in proportion to the number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to day; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors are these following, and their representatives if you can find them: All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each in their degree; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in England.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Men, God, People, Truth

“There are many cases where landlords take advantage of the needs of municipalities and even of national needs and of the monopoly which they have got in land in a particular neighbourhood in order to demand extortionate prices. Take the very well-known case of the Duke of Northumberland, when a county council wanted to buy a small plot of land as a site for a school to train the children who in due course would become the men labouring on his property. The rent was quite an insignificant thing; his contribution to the rates I think it was on the basis of 30s. an acre. What did he demand for it for a school? £900 an acre. All we say is this—if it is worth £900, let him pay taxes on £900.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Men, Children, School, Thinking

“A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 38 (Chinese saying)

Sleep

“The Englishman, in eleven years, gets three bushels more of wheat than the Frenchman. He gets three crops of barley, tares, or beans, which produce nearly twice as many bushels per acre, as what the three French crops of spring corn produce. And he farther gets, at the same time, three crops of turnips and two of clover, the turnips worth 40s. the acre, and the clover 60s. that is 12l. for both. What an enormous superiority! More wheat; almost double of the spring corn; and above 20s. per acre per annum in turnips and clover. But farther; the Englishman's land, by means of the manure arising from the consumption of the turnips and clover is in a constant state of improvement, while the Frenchman's farm is stationary.”

Arthur Young (1741–1820) English writer

Arthur Young (1791), Travels during the years 1787, 1788, and 1789: : undertaken more particularly with a view of ascertaining the cultivation, wealth, resources, and national prosperity of the kingdom of France, Volume 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=WLcFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA344, p. 344; Cited in: Jackson Spielvogel (2011), Western Civilization: Alternate Volume: Since 1300, p. 296

Spring, Time

“Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.”

Earl Warren (1891–1974) United States federal judge

On the subject of state Senate apportionment, in Reynolds v. Sims (1964)
1960s

People, Tree

“[Footnote:] Pliny the Elder described a Whale called "Balaena or Whirlpool, which is so long and broad as to take up more in length and breadth than two acres of ground." This brings up again the old question: Are the classics doomed? Our ancestors believed that four years of this sort of information would inevitably produce a President, or at least a Cabinet Member. It didn't seem to work out that way.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Whale
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Way, Question

“A grasshopper shrilled in a tuft at her feet and was answered by other shrillings among the gorse bushes; a solitary rook flapped heavily overhead, and a pair of goldfinches twittered among the thistle-down; there was no other sound except the scarcely perceptible never-ceasing sighing of the wind in the pines and its rustling of acres of heath-bells.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Last chapter
Heatherly

“I call those men worldly, earthly, or coarse, whose hearts and minds are wholly fixed on this earth, that small part of the universe they are placed in; who value and love nothing beyond it; whose minds are as cramped as that narrow spot of ground they call their estate, of which the extent is measured, the acres are numbered, and the limits well known. I am not astonished that men who lean, as it were, on an atom, should stumble at the smallest efforts they make for discovering the truth; that, being so short-sighted, they do not reach beyond the heavens and the stars, to contemplate God Himself; that, not being able to perceive the excellency of what is spiritual, or the dignity of the soul, they should be still less sensible of the difficulty of satisfying it; how very inferior the entire world is in comparison to it; how necessary is to it an all-perfect Being, which is God; and how absolutely it needs a religion to find out that God, and to be assured of His reality. I can easily understand that incredulity or indifference are but natural to such men, that they make use of God and religion only as a piece of policy, as far as they may be conducive to the order and decorum of this world, the only thing in their opinion worth thinking of.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of Freethinkers (3)
Les Caractères (1688)

Love, Men, God, Truth

“One hundred and twenty acres, according to the County Clerk, is the extent of my worldly domain. But the County Clerk is a sleepy fellow, who never looks at his record books before nine o’clock. What they would show at daybreak is the question here at issue. Books or no books, it is a fact, patent both to my dog and myself, that at daybreak I am the sole owner of all the acres I can walk over. It is not only boundaries that disappear, but also the thought of being bounded.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“July: Great Possessions”, p. 41.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "May: Back from the Argentine," "June: The Alder Fork," "July: Great Possessions," and "July: Prairie Birthday"

Books, Dogs, Question

“Political economists tell us that the produce of an acre of land in wheat, corn, potatoes, and other vegetables, and in fruits, will sustain animal life sixteen times as long as when the produce of the same acre is converted into flesh, by feeding and fattening animals upon it.”

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), p. 252

Life, Time, Animals

“…the principle of three acres and a cow, on which the election of 1885 was fought. The principle was that the local authority was to have power to acquire land by compulsion for the benefit of the community, in letting it out or otherwise disposing of it to individuals…It was on this proposal that the great charge of Socialism was made; but we were all Socialists now.”

William Harcourt (1827–1904) British politician

Speech on the Labourers' Allotments Bill (11 August, 1887).
'House Of Commons, Thursday, Aug. 11', The Times (12 August, 1887), p. 6.
Harcourt said "we are all Socialists now" but The Times reported his speech in past tense.

Communication

“I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle —
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.”

Edgar Lee Masters book Fiddler Jones

Fiddler Jones

Life, Memory, Dance

“Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

The Brothers.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Travel

“Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all burnt, ought it not, among so many world-wide conquests, to have a hundred acres or so of free greenfield, with trees on it, conquered, for its little children to disport in; for its all-conquering workers to take a breath of twilight air in? You would say so! A willing Legislature could say so with effect. A willing Legislature could say very many things! And to whatsoever 'vested interest,' or such like, stood up, gainsaying merely, "I shall lose profits,"—the willing Legislature would answer, "Yes, but my sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and a soul."—”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Life, Children, Health, World

“There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for one hundred years.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

As quoted in Biopolymers, Polyamides and Complex Proteinaceous Materials I (2003) by Stephen R. Fahnestock, Alexander Steinbüchel, p. 395
Attributed from posthumous publications

Alcohol

“I wanted the State of Massachusetts, which was called a Commonwealth but was filled with private wealth and private property, to change, as the early Christians had changed. They "had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as every man had need."
… at St. Francis Acres, the intentional community to which I belonged for about twenty years, for the last fifteen years we "divided the proceeds among the fellowship [the members] according to individual needs," even as we tried to share outside the community as well.”

Dave Dellinger (1915–2004) American activist

From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of A Moral Dissenter (1993).

Men, Communication, Change, Parting

“Mr. President, as I close, Mr. President, I heard you say Friday that you had questions for voters, particularly African- American voters. And you asked the question: Did the Democratic Party take us for granted? Well, I have raised questions. But let me answer your question. You said the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

From the 2004 DNC

Way, Question

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

Robert Ardrey book African Genesis

African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man (1961)

Peace, Dreams, Angels, Star

“I’m too tired to be angry enough
Angry that I can’t go anyplace
without seeing demeaning images and outright lies about Indian people
I’m livid that we can’t even keep the few pitiful acres we have left
if they happen to have uranium or copper or coal.”

Chrystos (1946) American writer, activist

"They're always telling me I'm too angry" (1995)

People

“I'm now done with this glorious continent [South America] …. I've seen all I sought for and far, far, far more. … wandered most joyfully … through millions of acres of the ancient tree I was so anxious to find, Araucaria braziliensis. Just think of the glow of my joy in these noble aboriginal forests — the face of every tree marked with the inherited experiences of millions of years. … Crossed the Andes… Then straight to snowline and found a glorious forest of Araucaria imbricata, the strangest of the strange genus.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. J.D. Hooker http://www.westadamsheritage.org/katharine-putnam-hooker (6 December 1911); published in The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 17, II; and in John Muir's Last Journey, edited by Michael P. Branch (Island Press, 2001), page 125  <br class="br">1910s

Thinking, Tree, Joy

“The Hindu was taxed to the extent of half the produce of his land, and had to pay duties on all his buffaloes, goats, and other milk-cattle. The taxes were to be levied equally on rich and poor, at so much per acre, so much per animal. Any collectors or officers taking bribes were summarily dismissed and heavily punished with sticks, pincers, the rack, imprisonment and chains. The new rules were strictly carried out, so that one revenue officer would string together 20 Hindu notables and enforce payment by blows. No gold or silver, not even the betelnut, so cheering and stimulative to pleasure, was to be seen in a Hindu house, and the wives of the impoverished native officials were reduced to taking service in Muslim families. Revenue officers came to be regarded as more deadly than the plague; and to be a government clerk was disgrace worse than death, in so much that no Hindu would marry his daughter to such a man. … [These edicts] were so strictly carried out that the chaukidars and khuts and muqad-dims were not able to ride on horseback, to find weapon, to wear fine clothes, or to indulge in betel.. …. No Hindu could hold up his head. ….. Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains were all employed to enforce payment.”

Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931) British orientalist

Lane Poole : Medieval India, quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Death, Pleasure, Family, Animals

“Patton looked like his father and had similar mannerisms. Their speech was somewhat alike as well. It was pretty evident that young Patton was the son of the old man. However, the impressive thing about George is that he didn't concern himself with his last name. He went out and made a career, earning everything on his own… He did a very good job in command of the 11th ACR and handled himself professionally. It's quite a burden the son of a senior officer has to carry and I must say, to his credit, he did it well. Because down through history, when you look at the sons of famous people, they were not all winners.”

William Westmoreland (1914–2005) United States Army general

On George S. Patton, IV, son of the famous World War II American general. As quoted in The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 129-130

People, History

“Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well—for we will not fight to save what we do not love (but only appreciate in some abstract sense). So let them all continue—the films, the books, the television programs, the zoos, the little half acre of ecological preserve in any community, the primary school lessons, the museum demonstrations, even […] the 6:00 A. M. bird walks. Let them continue and expand because we must have visceral contact in order to love. We really must make room for nature in our hearts.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Unenchanted Evening", p. 40
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Love, Books, School, Communication

“Let us go forward in the good work we have in hand and let us put our trust, not in squires and peers, and not in titles or in acres; I will go further and say, not in man, as such, but in Almighty God, who is the God of justice, and who has ordained the principle of right, of equity, and of freedom to be the guides and the masters of our lives.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Edinburgh (30 June 1892), quoted in The Times (1 July 1892), p. 12.
1890s

God, Justice, Freedom

“The ploughman knows how many acres he shall upturn from dawn to sunset: but the thinker knows not what a day may bring forth.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 136

“The generally accepted computation is that 2½ acres of land are required to provide a minimum adequate diet for each person, by Western standards anyhow. On a vegetarian diet it has been estimated that 1½ acres per head may provide enough. The reason for this difference is that animals grazed for meat-eating purposes require about 15 times more land than is necessary to raise an equivalent amount of nutrition in the form of grains, vegetables and fruit for human consumption. This means that India, on a vegetarian diet, is living far more wisely within its own land resources than are the meat-eating peoples.”

Richard Gregg (social philosopher)

Which Way Lies Hope? An Examination of Capitalism, Communism, Socialism and Gandhiji's Programme (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1952), p. 8 https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.54786/2015.54786.Which-Way-Lies-Hope#page/n15/mode/2up.

People, Time, Animals, Personality

“Now he was indifferent to all "questions" save that prime solicitude of the human race, how to hold its own against the hostile forces everywhere leagued against it. Life was a perpetual struggle, and, let dreamers say what they might, could never be anything else; he, for one, perceived no right that he had to claim exemption from the doom of labour. Had he felt an impulse to any other kind of work, well and good, he would have turned to it; but nothing whatever called to him with imperative voice save this task of tilling his own acres. It might not always satisfy him; he took no vow of one sole vocation; he had no desire to let his mind rust whilst his hands grew horny. Enough that for the present he had an aim which he saw as a reality.”

George Gissing (1857–1903) English novelist

Source: Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), Ch. XXVIII

Life, Hostility, Question, Reality

“We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume-that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success. I have my reasons why I want to be filthy rich. It's so I can buy the last first growth forest and turn it into a permanent national park. I just bought 800 acres on the border of Panama and Costa Rica.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Detour, (1993)

People, Success

“Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U. S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A. M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 72.

Mountain, Business, Water, Reading

“I do recall one particular night shoot… We were called to the set at four o'clock in the afternoon. As usual, nothing was ready. They'd built a set of Tiberius's grotto, on three acres, and were assembling all of the extras and background. The producers worriedly asked if I would go into Peter's trailer (he was playing Tiberius) and go through the lines with him, which we did few times.
And then he told me the most remarkable story – whether it is true or not I have no idea – about his grave-robbing Etruscan tombs. He said the best way to find Etruscan jewellery and artefacts was to find the drains in the tombs, and very gingerly sift through them with your fingers because, as the bodies decompose, all of the artifacts deposit themselves into the channels. The thought of Peter O'Toole on his hands and knees in an Etruscan catacomb makes for a lovely image.
We spent hours and hours in this trailer. He was smoking … it certainly wasn't tobacco. By the time we got onto the set, 12 hours had passed. We couldn't believe our eyes: the set was covered with people engaging in every sexual perversion in the book. We were totally bemused.
Peter would start off his speech, "Rome was but a city…" then pause, look around, and say to me: "Are they doing the Irish jig over there?"”

Malcolm McDowell (1943) English actor

I'd look over and there would be two dwarves and an amputee dancing around some girls splayed out on a giant dildo. This went on quite a few times. <br class="br">As quoted in "Malcolm McDowell on Peter O'Toole: Caligula, catacombs and chicken gizzards" https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/17/malcolm-mcdowell-peter-otoole-caligula-graves, The Guardian (17 December, 2013)

Love, People, Books, Way

“Green Acres is the place to be;
Farm living is the life for me.”

Vic Mizzy (1916–2009) American composer

Theme song, Green Acres.

Life

“What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?”

Horace book Satires

Book I, satire i, line 48
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)

Nature

“Seat way back listening to Anita Baker, Riding by myself smoking weed by the acre.”

Lil Wayne (1982) American rapper, singer, record executive and businessman

Upgrade
Official Mix tapes, Da Drought 3 (2007)

Way

“We're going to shoot all the PT supporters in Acre.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

About the Workers' Party (PT) supporters, during a electoral meeting https://g1.globo.com/politica/eleicoes/2018/noticia/2018/09/06/stf-da-10-dias-para-bolsonaro-explicar-declaracao-sobre-fuzilar-a-petralhada.ghtml in the state of Acre on 1 September 2018. Brazil presidential candidate Bolsonaro's most controversial quotes https://www.yahoo.com/news/brazil-presidential-candidate-bolsonaros-most-controversial-quotes-012652084.html. Yahoo! (29 September 2018).

Support

“Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts — I certainly have to laugh at myself — It's like feeling around in the dark — thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't — and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel — like a wreck — Have been working like mad all day — and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be — when the sun begins to go down — and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train — It is a very special sort of sick feeling.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

New York City (February 1916), p. 145
1910s, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Color, Feeling, Home, Water

“We permit absolute possession of the soil of our country, with no legal rights of existence on the soil to the vast majority who do not possess it. A great landholder may legally convert his whole property into a forest or a hunting-ground, and expel every human being who has hitherto lived upon it. In a thickly-populated country like England, where every acre has its owner and its occupier, this is a power of legally destroying his fellow-creatures; and that such a power should exist, and be exercised by individuals, in however small a degree, indicates that, as regards true social science, we are still in a state of barbarism.”

Alfred Russel Wallace book The Malay Archipelago

Last Words, addendum to later editions.
The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Exercises, Science, Country

“It is psychology, not soil or climate, that enables a man to raise five times as many potatoes per acre as the average in his own state.”

Harrington Emerson (1853–1931) American efficiency engineer and business theorist

Source: The twelve principles of efficiency (1912), p. 107 ; cited in: Hugo Münsterberg. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 1913, p. 52

Time

“Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air
In his own ground.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

"Ode on Solitude", st. 1 (c. 1700).

Happiness

“If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field such as one of these, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labor per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.”

Masanobu Fukuoka book The One-Straw Revolution

Source: The One-Straw Revolution (1975), Chapter 3, pp. 103-104

People, Food, Support, Winter

“Muscle shoals. The production of nitrogen for plant food in peace and explosives in war is more and more important. It is one of the chief sustaining elements of life. It is estimated that soil exhaustion each year is represented by about 9,000,000 tons and replenishment by 5,450,000 tons. The deficit of 3,550,000 tons is reported to represent the impairment of 118,000,000 acres of farm lands each year.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Life, War, Peace, Food

“Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. […] It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed (1974), Chapter 1 (pp. 1–2)

Men, World, Universe, Dependency

“She would sweep the floor – unending expanses, acres and acres of floor – with a short broom called the jhadu, swiping away the dust in an arc with its long tail, which reminded one of the drooping tail of some nameless, exotic bird.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

Bird

“It is estimated that the value of the crops for this harvest year may reach $13,000,000,000, which is an increase of over $3,000,000,000 in three years. It compares with $7,100,000,000 in 1913, arid if we make deduction from the figures of 1924 for the comparatively decreased value of the dollar, the yield this year still exceeds 1913 in purchasing power by over $1,000,000,000, and in this interval there has been no increase in the number of farmers. Mostly by his own effort the farmer has decreased the cost of production. A marked increase in the price of his products and some decrease in the price of his supplies has brought him about to a parity with the rest of the Nation. The crop area of this season is estimated at 370,000,000 acres, which is a decline of 3,000,000 acres from last year, and 6,000,000 acres from 1919. This has been a normal and natural application of economic laws, which has placed agriculture on a foundation which is undeniably sound and beginning to be satisfactory.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Law, Nature, Effort, Season

“There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming small Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say, Noew York, Geneva or Washington, which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the "temporary center of international peace". The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, aying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed "candles of peace" in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a "peace chain", although it was not large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base. Ohio's famous ethnic diversity was only on display. We did everything possible to emphasize the fact that in the American heartland people from every part of southeastern Europe lived together in peace, their competition restricted to softball games, church rivalries, and the occasional barroom fight. (…)”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 234

People, Family, Peace, History

“In 1863, Colonel Kit Carson was ordered to clear the country of Navajo Indians and to resettle any survivors at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, where they could be "civilized." Carson's strategy was the same as that applied against the Plains Indians a little later: He destroyed the Navajo food base by systematically killing their livestock and by burning their fields. Carson's "Long Knives" (his soldiers so named because of their bayonets) also cut off the breast of Navajo girls and tossed them back and forth like baseballs…. Ultimately, about 8,500 Navajos made what they still call the "Long Walk" to captivity at Fort Sumner, three hundred miles away. After they had been there for four years, the Navajo signed a peace treaty that entitled them to a reservation of about 3,500,000 acres, much less than they had held previously.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Peace, Food, Girl, Country

“I went to the Rayburn Building the other day on trifling business. It was an appalling experience. I had forgotten how preposterous the thing is with its pretentious megatonnage of rock and steel spreading acre after acre down the slope of Capitol Hill in sullen defiance to eternity and man.
It dwarfs the forum of the Caesars. Mussolini would have wept in envy.
Inside, one is compelled to dwell upon the insignificance of humanity. Not a single tiny wisp of beauty, nothing that is graceful, or charming, or eccentric, or human presents itself to the senses. Trying to imagine Clay and Webster in this celebration to the death of the spirit, erected to the glory that was Congress, is an exercise in comic despair.
What do we have? Banks of stainless-steel elevators. Miracles of plumbing. Corridors of cemetery marble stretching to far horizons under the most artificial light millions of dollars can create, a light that abides no shadow, grants no privacy, tolerates nothing that is interesting in the slightest degree.
Occasionally a small figure appeared in the distance, grew larger, then larger, then assumed human proportion, then passed and became smaller, and smaller, and smaller. Two ants had passed in a pyramid.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Moods of Washington" (p.36)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Death, Beauty, Exercises, Imagination

“A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician. Accordingly, I have purchased a few acres about nine miles from town, have built a house, and am cultivating a garden.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

Letter to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (29 December 1802)

Disappointment, Housing

“An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Lord Bacon

“As we all know, the Lord is almighty – he knows all and sees far. And so, one day, he let forest fire burn a good swath of state land, laying waste to acres of the dry, pine forest around the town of Joensuu. The people did everything in their power to put a stop to his work, as they always did, but he burned the forest undeterred, just as far as it suited him. He had his own plans.”

Väinö Linna book The Unknown Soldier

Opening words, p. 1.
The Unknown Soldier

People

“My schoolmates could not understand why anyone would want to write a story; and, above all, they could not understand why I had called it The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre. The mood out of which a story was written was the most alien thing conceivable to them.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Mood, Hell, Understanding

“I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls
The burial-ground God's-Acre!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

God's-Acre, st. 1 (1842).
Context: I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls
The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just;
It consecrates each grave within its walls,
And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust.

God

“Between 1887, when the Dawes Act was passed, and 1934, out of 138 million acres that had been their meager allotment, all but 56 million acres had been appropriated by Whites. …not a single acre”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: A well-intentioned movement had gained support to give the remnant Indian populations the dignity of private property, and the plan was widely adopted in the halls of Congress, in the press, and in the meetings of religious societies.... the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887... provided that after every Indian had been allotted land, any remaining surplus would be put up for sale to the public. The loopholes... made it an efficient instrument for separating the Indians from this land.... The first lands to go were the richest—bottom lands in river valleys, or fertile grasslands. Next went the slightly less desirable lands... and so on, until all the Indian had left to him was desert that no White considered worth the trouble to take.... Between 1887, when the Dawes Act was passed, and 1934, out of 138 million acres that had been their meager allotment, all but 56 million acres had been appropriated by Whites.... not a single acre [of which] was judged uneroded by soil conservationists.

“I chose the number of the bill, 40, as a symbol of the forty acres and a mule that the United States initially promised freed slaves. This unfulfilled promise and the serious devastation that slavery had on African-American lives has never been officially recognized by the United States Government.”

John Conyers (1929–2019) American politician from Michigan

Reparations, Conyers.house.gov. https://web.archive.org/web/20150829135025/http://conyers.house.gov/index.cfm/reparations

“The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free.
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development

Universe, Law, Art

“We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"The Rise"
The Long-Legged House (1969)

Singing, Beauty, Self-confidence, Thinking

“Other countries have obtained deliverances equally signal and complete, but in no country has that deliverance been obtained with such perfect peace; so entirely within the bounds of the Constitution; with all the forms of law observed; the government of the country proceeding in its regular course; every man going forth unto his labour until the evening. France boasts of her three days of July, when her people rose, when barricades fenced the streets, and the entire population of the capital in arms successfully vindicated their liberties. They boast, and justly, of those three days of July; but I will boast of our ten days of May. We, too, fought a battle, but it was with moral arms. We, too, placed an impassable barrier between ourselves and military tyranny; but we fenced ourselves only with moral barricades. Not one crime committed, not one acre confiscated, not one life lost, not one instance of outrage or attack on the authorities or the laws. Our victory has not left a single family in mourning. Not a tear, not a drop of blood, has sullied the pacific and blameless triumph of a great people.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Speech to his committee at Leeds after the Reform Bill had received the Royal assent (1832), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume I (1876), pp. 283–284
1830s

Family, Peace, Law, Country

“Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers, where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome of all visitors.”

Timothy Thomas Fortune (1856–1928) American writer and activist

On the phenomenon that would come to be called primitive accumulation of capital, in Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (1884)

Family, Death

“In France the height of the structures is limited to five or six storeys: in America stores frequently tower up fifteen storeys or more, and with rapid smooth-running lifts one floor is as good as another. These buildings measure their floor area by the acre, and twenty, thirty, or even forty acres of floor space—or even two million square feet—are not extraordinary, while it is quite likely that before the ink on these pages has become dry some great merchant with imagination, courage and ambition will announce his purpose of erecting a structure perhaps twice as large as any now in existence. If he does so it will not be for the sake of having the biggest thing on earth but because more space will allow him to set the word "perfection" further out in the hitherto unexplored fields of endeavour.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

Perfection, Courage, Imagination

“From the standpoint of economy alone, the diet of the fields and orchards ought to appeal successfully to every one possessed of undoubted sanity. One acre devoted to wheat will support ten times as many men as one devoted to grazing. If men would take the beautiful products of the soil fresh from Nature's hand, instead of sitting down and devouring, in the form of the accumulated residuum or ruminants^ an acre at a meal, the problems o human poverty and over-population would be immensely simplified.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), What Shall We Eat?, p. 92

Time, Support, Beauty, Nature