Quotes about grain
page 2

“Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

[Unhappy Meals, 2007-01-28, The New York Times Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?ei=5090&en=a18a7f35515014c7&ex=1327640400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print, 2007-01-28]

Health, Food, Box

“A well-known joke - a fool who thought he was a grain of corn. After some time in a mental hospital he was cured; now he knew that he was not a grain, but a man. So they let him out; but soon after he came running back saying, 'I met a hen and I was afraid she would try to eat me.' The doctors tried to calm him down. 'What are you afraid of? You know you are not a grain, but a man.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

The fool answered: 'Yes of course I know that, but does the hen know?'
33
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Fools, Time

“He must have been a gardener that cared a lot
Who weeded out the tears and grew a good crop.
But now it all looks strange, it's funny how one insect
Can damage so much grain.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny), his song dedicated to John Lennon
Song lyrics, Jump Up! (1982)

Tear

“A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars.”

Carlo Rovelli (1956) Italian physicist

Source: Seven Brief Lectures on Physics (2014), p. 34

Smile, History, Mountain, Star

“Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section VI (p. 365).

Truth, Sense

“Growing up, my diet was pretty easy and simple — I was raised on a vegetarian diet. … When I was 15, I watched the documentary Glass Walls [by PETA] and read The China Study [by T. Colin Campbell], and then it became quite clear to me why I wanted to be vegetarian and why I wanted to adopt a vegan lifestyle. After doing my research, I chose to go vegan and have been dedicated to a vegan diet for four years now. … I feel healthier on a clean, whole foods diet that is very simple — especially during competition. And since a plant-based diet is less calorically dense than other diets, I need to make sure I’m eating enough food so I up my portions a lot. I think of veggies as nutrition and water, not a food where I can get energy so I don’t even count veggies when I’m counting calories and nutrition. For energy, I go to potatoes, whole grains, and starchy veggies. I’m obsessed with carrots and sweet potatoes.”

Tia Blanco (1997)

"Why Surfer Tia Blanco Is Vegan" https://web.archive.org/web/20170315222610/http://www.mensjournal.com:80/health-fitness/articles/why-surfer-tia-blanco-is-vegan-w471552, interview with Men's Journal (March 2017).

Food, Feeling, Thinking, Study

“There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria. There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Planetary Exploration (University of Oregon Books, Eugene, Oregon, 1970), page 15

World, Way, Star, Universe

“Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect", pp. 383-4.

Wealth

“When it comes to the traits we consider most important in a long-term mate, human beings are largely monomorphic. This is one of the most significant findings of these studies; however, it is easily overlooked when the discussion becomes fixated on traits that people consider less important but where sex differences are found. By shining a spotlight on these traits, we may create an inaccurate picture of our species, even though the differences are real. Our picture of human nature may be built on a foundation of exceptions to the rule. The rule — the fact that males and females in our species are surprisingly similar in many ways — may be relegated to the background. By taking genuine differences and then exaggerating their importance, our picture of our evolved nature may become a caricature: It may contain a recognizable grain of truth but distort its object.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 267

People, Truth, Sex, Way

“Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences.
Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.
Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964) " Science, Strong Inference -- Proper Scientific Method (The New Baconians) http://256.com/gray/docs/strong_inference.html. In: Science Magazine 16 October 1964, Volume 146, Number 3642. Cited in: Gerald Weinberg (1975) Introduction to General Systems Thinking. p. 1, and in multiple other sources.

Beauty, Way, Mathematics, Problem

“Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

December “HOUSE TO HOUSE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Food, Waiting

“An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that "when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre."”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

Saturday Pioneer (3 January 1891)
The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer (1890 and 1891)

Wisdom, Victory, Fight

“The most reliable and best armed groups of the mass of revolutionary contingents organised to take extreme measures to overcome the famine shall be detailed for dispatch to all stations and all uyezds of the principal grain supplying gubernias. These groups, with the participation of railwaymen delegated by local railway committees, shall be authorised, firstly, to control the movement of grain freights; secondly, take charge of the collection and storage of grain; thirdly, adopt the most extreme revolutionary measures to fight speculators and to requisition grain stocks. When making any record of requisition, arrest or execution, the revolutionary contingents shall summon at least six witnesses to be selected from the poorest section of the population closest at hand.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet With Delegates From the Food Supply Organisations” (27 January 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 503.
1910s

Fight

“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”

René Daumal (1908–1944) French poet and writer

Vol. 2, Essais et Notes
The Lie of the Truth (1938)

Truth, Hope, Error

“After the rainy season was over, he made up his mind to take possession of the fort of Narwar which was in the domain of Mãlwã. He ordered Jalãl Khãn Lodî, the governor of Kãlpî, to go there and besiege the fort… The Sultãn himself reached Narwar after some time… He kept the fort under siege for an year… The soldiers went out to war everyday and got killed… “Thereafter the inhabitants of the fort were in plight due to scarcity of water and dearness of grains, and they asked for forgiveness. They went out with their wealth and property. The Sultãn laid waste the temples and raised mosques. Men of learning and students were made to reside there and given scholarships and grants. He stayed for six months under the walls of the fort.”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Sikandar Lodî (AD 1489-1517) Narwar (Madhya Pradesh)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

Men, War, Forgiveness, Learning

“How much freer and happier we would feel, and how much more powerful we would be, if only we stopped struggling against the grain of our natural gifts and inclinations, stopped trying to be what we are not, and instead used willpower to stay true to an exciting and joyful life purpose.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self (2003)
The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self (2003)

Life, Feeling, Nature

“Please finish every grain of rice in your bowl. Do not forget that each grain represents one drop of farmer's blood.”

Robert Kuok (1923) Malaysian businessman

Cap 1 "Moulded by Mother"

Forgetting

“America is so big that it cries for work. In Germany, if you tried to find work, you couldn't. In America, it was a strange economy which caused unemployment. German unemployment was due to the boycott of German goods. Not an official boycott. The world market refused to accept German goods. France, England, and America refused. Germany had no colonies and she had to export manufactured goods for grain. We had nothing to speak of. We managed to live during the war by rations. We all lived on a strict ration - even ministers in the government like myself - and we lived on things from the conquered countries, including Africa and Russia.”

Fritz Sauckel (1894–1946) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, February 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History -

War, World, Country

“A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, pp.283/284
1910 - 1935

Way, Quotes, Sleep, Memory

“.. wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miró admonished art-critic w:Georges Duthuit
1915 - 1940
Source: 'Où allez-vous Miró?' (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936

Art, Home, Soul, Courage

“About Van Gogh.. a man who is on fire, a torch. His sincerity is absolute. His best painting is the grain field where he kills himself. There we find ourselves at the border of the art of painting. We cannot go further.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1980's
Source: Je peins l'Impossibilité de peindre, by M. Nuridsany, newspaper Le Figaro, 24-10-1989, p. 35, as quoted in Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 40 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)

Art, Painting, Sincerity

“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate, she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?
Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the sharecroppers’s wife in Alabama and the lama in Tibet and the entomologist in Peru and the millworker in Odessa and the greengrocer in London and the goatherd in Nigeria and the old, old man sharpening a stick by a dry streambed somewhere in Australia, and all the others. There is not one of us who has not known them. There are enough of them, enough to keep us going. Perhaps.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Lathe of Heaven

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 7 (Heather)

Hate, People, Way, Universe

“There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 37
Essais (1595), Book II
Variant: There were never in the world two opinions alike, any more than two hairs or two grains. Their most universal quality is diversity.

World, Universe

“In exporting the Great American Steak Religion we are exporting a desire for the impossible. The earth could never provide the majority of its people with the grain-fed-meat-centered diet that Americans take for granted.”

Frances Moore Lappé book Diet for a Small Planet

Source: Diet for a Small Planet, pp. 94-95

People, Religion

“Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Secret, Education, Food, Study

“When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.”

John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer

The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1952 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Heart

“The word "vegetarian" derives from the Latin "vegetus"—whole, sound, fresh, lively. The meat humans eat is neither whole, sound, fresh or lively. It is dis-limbed, tainted, decaying, stale and dead. A diet consisting of green leafy vegetables, root crops, grains, berries, nuts and fruits supplies all the body needs for strength and well-being. It is healthful food, aesthetic, economical, harmless to our brother animals, easy to grow, to prepare and to digest. Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical.”

Helen Nearing (1904–1995) American writer

Source: Simple Food for the Good Life (1980), Ch. 4

Health, Food, Animals, Dead

“We do not mark out any precise line to be followed in diet; but we do say that in countries where there are fruits, grains, and nuts in abundance, flesh food is not the right food for God's people.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

Vol. 9 http://www.whiteestate.org/books/egwhc/EGWHCc27.html#sth6, p. 159 Testimonies for the Church (1855 - 1868)

God, People, Food, Country

“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.”

Hugh Iltis (1925–2016) Czech-American botanist and environmentalist

[January 2000, Homeotic Sexual Translocations and the Origin of Maize (Zea mays, Poaceae): A New Look at an Old Problem, Economic Botany, 54, 1, 7–42, 10.1007/BF02866598] (quote from p. 7)

World, Food, Way, Season

“About three million must be regarded as middle peasants, while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers… Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! … [Class struggle entails] ruthless suppression of the kulaks, those bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who batten on famine.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight! Collected Works, Vol. 28, pages 53-7.
Attributions

Death, War, People

“Archivists take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. You think there's a troll behind the screen and don't know what's going on, what's the accountability. She walked us through this great unknown, Wikipedia land. She put us at ease.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Liza Posas, Austry National Center librarian and archivist — quoted in: **Woo, Elaine (April 23, 2014). "Adrianne Wadewitz dies at 37; helped diversify Wikipedia" http://www.latimes.com/obituaries/la-me-adrianne-wadewitz-20140424,0,1077455.story. Los Angeles Times. About

Thinking

“In the working of wood and for the determining of its character I had had enough experience in my five-year pursuit of woodcutting. I also always gladly let the various charming grainings and sometimes the knots become involved in the printing.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

in Nolde's letter, c. 1910; in Alois J. Schardt, 'Nolde als Graphiker', Das Kunstblatt 11, no. 8., 1927, p. 289; as quoted in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 52
1900 - 1920

“At the beginning of the 1980s the world community faces much greater dangers than at any time since the Second World War. It is clear that the world economy is now functioning so badly that it damages both the immediate and longer-run interests of all nations…The problems of poverty and hunger are becoming more serious; there are already 800 million absolute poor and their numbers are rising; shortages of grain and other foods are increasing the prospect of hunger and starvation…Between 20 and 25 million children below the age of five die every year in developing countries…A number of poor countries are threatened with the irreversible destruction of their ecological systems while many more face growing food deficits and possibly mass starvation. In the international economy there is the possibility of… a collapse of credit with defaults by major debtors, or bank failures… [and] an intensified struggle for influence or control over resources leading to military conflicts.”

Willy Brandt (1913–1992) German social-democratic politician; Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany

Attributed in "Are We Nearing Armageddon?", article on The Watchtower magazine, 1980, 10/15.

Hunger, War, Children, Age

“To an atheist […], there is no all-seeing all-loving god to keep us free from harm. But atheism is not a recipe for despair. I think the opposite. By disclaiming the idea of the next life, we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism is life-affirming, in a way religion can never be. Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question. Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "There must be more than just this world, than just this life". But how much more do you want? We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

End of the part 2: "The Virus of Faith" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMUG6qd98wc The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Love, Life, God, People

“Poor is he who in traitor doth confide :
Never shall snow-clad land good grain provide.
Poor she who in deserter faith doth show :
Never shall flowers on withered branches grow.”

Francesco Dall'Ongaro (1808–1873) Italian poet, playwright and librettist

Povero chi si fida ad un marrano:
Terra nevosa non mena più grano.
Povera chi si fida a un disertore :
Di ramo seco non germoglia fiore.
Stornelli Politici, "Il Disertore".
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 395.

Faith, Confidence, Flowers

“For every 16 pounds of grain and soy fed to beef cattle in the United States we only get 1 pound back in meat on our plates. The other 15 pounds are inaccessible to us, either used by the animal to produce energy or to make some part of its own body that we do not eat (like hair or bones) or excreted.”

Frances Moore Lappé book Diet for a Small Planet

Source: Diet for a Small Planet, p. 69

Animals, Parting

“Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still… you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

Crime Time interview (2001)

Hate, Books

“In closing, I should like to cite a line from William Blake. “To see a world in a grain of sand - - - ” and allude to a possible parallel to see worlds in an electron.”

Hans Georg Dehmelt (1922–2017) German physicist

concluding his Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1989/dehmelt-lecture.html referring to the richness of the physics of subatomic particles.

World

“Now down in the Ocean sank the fiery light of day,
drawing the dark night across the grain-giving earth.”

Homér Iliad

VIII. 485–486 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Light, Drawing, Night

“The essential is the object. Error consists in forgetting that grain, cotton, wool are vital objects and in being interested in them only because of their value in gold, their speculative value. The economic purpose is not 'to make millionaires out of gasoline' but to distribute gasoline according to demand and need. [Wall street] is an abstraction.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from exhibition catalogue, John Becker Gallery, New York, March 1933
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1930's

Error, Forgetting

“When I was six, we moved to the small town of Stratford, about fifteen miles northeast of Wynnewood. My father had worked as a banker, a grain farmer, a fix-it man, and a mechanic. Now he was ready for a new line of work. When I was young, his restless streak seemed perfectly normal. A few years later, I realized that he was an optimistic dreamer, convinced that the next job or business would make us rich. And the fact is that my dad was good at everything he took on. Maybe too good. There wasn't a refrigerator, an outboard motor, a gas or diesel engine that he couldn't repair. If somebody drove over a backfiring John Deere Model 60 tractor to have Ray Franks "take a little look at the damn timing chain," my father would rebuild the engine. And if they'd shaken hands on a price of ten dollars for the job, he would not accept a nickel more, even if he'd spent fifteen dollars on spare parts.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 9

Business, Time, Parting

“Not so long ago it was possible to take some little comfort from the idea that the clash, if it came, could perhaps be settled by what were called "conventional weapons "-bombs, tanks, cannon and men. Today that little grain of comfort is denied us for it has been made clear that the weapons of ultimate horror will certainly be used, and the military planning of nations is on that basis. The unconventional has become the conventional, and who knows what other examples of misguided and diabolical scientific skill have been discovered as a plague on humanity.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Men, Idea

“The nature poet may (should in fact ), resort to the field guide or library but will keep coming back, figuratively speaking, to the trail - to the grain of experience.”

Don McKay (1942) Canadian poet

Baler Twine

Nature

“Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general, of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love — and he was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires — longing. Without conscious intention he began to clutch at every passing caprice, taking it for a desire and an object.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Love, Life, Men, Happiness

“Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed the never ending machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do, who have left the track.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

Stupidity, Game, Business, Time

“life is
only
as good as the memories we makeSo long astoria
i found a map to buried treasure
and even if we come home empty handed
well still have our stories
of battle scars, pirate ships and wounded hearts,
broken bones, and all the best of friendshipsand when this hourglass
has filtered out
its final grain of sand
i raise my glass to the memories we had
this is my wish
this is my wish
im takin back
im takin them all back”

Kris Roe (1978) American composer and singer

Song lyrics, So Long, Astoria (2003)

Life, Home, Memory, Heart

“Turning our seed-wheat-kennel tares,
To burn-grain thistle, and to vaporie darnel,
Cockle, wild oats, rough burs, corn-cumbring
Tares.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

Second Week, First Day, Part iii. Compare: "Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn", William Shakespeare, King Lear, act iv. sc. 4.
La Seconde Semaine (1584)

“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. […] It is breaking Aristotle's canon—to demand in every enquiry that the degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).

Life, Men, People, Truth

“Each time we eat we are choosing to support a system. In our choice of agricultural production methods, we can support one which either helps our future, or one which undermines it. The same is true of our actual dietary choices we make. The healthiest diet is one rich in fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains and legumes, low in animal products. This is better for the environment, our health and of course animals. I'm a vegan because I care for animals and for the future of our planet. Additionally, a vegan diet helps to prevent and reverse a range of non-communicable diseases including heart disease, high blood pressure, cholesterol, type II diabetes. Each time we eat, we are either feeding disease, or fighting it.”

Elizabeth Kucinich (1977) British activist

"Food, Regenerative Agriculture & Climate", in ElizabethKucinich.com (2016) https://www.elizabethkucinich.com/issues.

Health, Disease, Support, Time

“"By what method or methods can the able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains from the general mass of sand: the able men, not the sham-able;—and set to do the work of governing, contriving, administering and guiding for us!" It is the question of questions. All that Democracy ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again by the Best.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Downing Street (April 1, 1850)

Life, Men, Democracy, Question

“117: It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and, learning to be self-critical?”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

Children, Education, Learning

“We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas-guzzling automobiles. Big cars “made sense” only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat “makes sense” only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.”

Frances Moore Lappé book Diet for a Small Planet

Source: Diet for a Small Planet, p. 73

Cars, Sense

“"Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.” Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.” And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt."”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

" Andrea Dworkin Has Died http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html" by Susie Bright, Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005. About

Men, People, Quotes, Problem

“One day I attempted to reach silence directly, with greater resignation, surrendering to the fate that governs any profound struggle. My millions of furious clawings became millions of grains of dust, of sand... A new geo-graphy lit my way, carrying me from surprise to surprise: suggestions of unusual combinations and molecular structures, of atomic phenomena, of the world of galaxies or of images in a microscope. The symbolism of dust — 'to be one with dust, here lies the profound identity, that is, the inner profundity between man and nature' (Tao Te Ching) —, of ashes, of the earth from whence we come and to which we return, of the solidarity born when we realise that the differences among ourselves are like those between one grain of sand and the next..”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

Fate, World, Way, Nature

“The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. …grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams… The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.3 The Embryonic Meme

Age, History

“With a grain of salt.”
Cum grano salis.

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book XXIII, sec. 8.
Naturalis Historia

“When I saw a policeman strolling toward me I walked away. It was a hot night. Sand from the Mojave had blown across the city. Tiny brown grains of sand clung to my fingertips whenever I touched anything, and when I got back to my room I found the mechanism of my new typewriter glutted with sand. It was in my ears and in my hair. When I took off my clothes it fell like powder to the floor. It was even between the sheets of my bed. Lying in the darkness, the red light from the St. Paul Hotel flashing on and off across my bed was bluish now, a ghastly color jumping into the room and out again.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Color, Lying, Light, Clothes

“You should knot that a certain Franciscan from France, whose name indeed was Franz, was here not many days since and had such conversation with me concerning the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the adoration of the saints and their intercession for us. He was not able to convince me with the assistance of a single passage of Scripture that the saints do pray for us, as he had with a great deal of assurance boasted he should do. At last he went to Basel, where he recounted the affair in an entirely different way from the reality - in fact he lied about it. So it seemed good to me to let you know about these things that you might not be ignorant of that Cumaean lion, if perchance he should ever turn your way.
There followed within six days another strife with our brethren preachers of the [different orders in Zurich, especially with the Augustinians]. Finally the burgonmaster and the Council appointed for them three commissioners on whom this was enjoined - that Aquinas and the rest of the doctors of that class being put aside they should base their arguments alone upon those sacred writings which are contained in the Bible. This troubled those beasts so much that one brother, the father reader of the order of Preachers [i. e., the Dominicans] cut loose from us, and we wept - as one weeps when a cross-grained and rich stepmother has departed this life. Meanwhile there are those who threaten, but God will turn the evil upon His enemies.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter July 30th to Rhenanus ibid, p.170-171

Life, God, Way, Reality

“Structural concept in nature:
The grouping of the smallest recognizable entities in matter:
Bone matter is cellular or tubular. Ligament structure is a sinuous-fibrous web.
Tendons are continuous with the connective tissue of the muscle, strengthened by cross grain.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

I.8 Material Structure. in Nature, p. 26
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

Nature

“Sow the seeds of life — humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 211.

Love, Life, Soul

“See this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.”

Robert McCammon book Boy's Life

Introduction.
Boy's Life (1991)

God, People, Youth, Age

“To go against the grain is the secret of bravery.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Simplicity http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21390/Simplicity From the poems written in English

Secret

“Keeping the Army of Northern Virginia fed and clothed was a never-ending struggle. His men were making their own shoes now, when they could get the leather, which as not often. The ration was down to three-quarters of a pound of meat a day, along with a little salt, sugar, coffee- or rather, chicory and burnt grain- and lard. Bread, rice, corn… they trickled up the Virginia Central and Orange and Alexandria Railroad every so often, but not nearly often enough. He would have to cut the daily allowance again, if more did not arrive soon. President Davis, however, was as aware of all that as Lee could make him. To hash it over once more would only seem like carping.”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 4

Men, Shoe, Coffee, Clothes

“If no one gambled against the grain in good times, there would be no winners to inspire people in the bad times.”

Aaron C. Brown (1956) American financial analyst

Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 4, A Brief History of Risk Denial, p. 81

People, Time

“Splendid Things
Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree.”

Sei Shonagon (966–1025) Japanese author and a court lady

Source: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1002), p. 109

Flowers, Tree

“[…], and the traffic noise that boomed in through the window was another reminder of what his spirit knew, that he was but a grain of sand in someone else's desert.”

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) English author and academic

Page 150.
Stepping Westward (1965)

“And I learned very early [Josef Albers was then ten years old] how to make imitation of wood grain. This is something I have in common with Georges Braque. Braque also learned very early from his father how to imitate marble or wood grain. So I could easily make the appearance of oak or walnut on pine. That is very easy; a very simple technique. And I learned how to imitate marble. I never made such a good joke as Braque did. When he was in the Mediterranean he fooled his friends. He painted a rowboat that had wood on one side and marble on the other side. You see, when he'd row out of the city it looked as if he were in a boat of a different material than when he came back, you see, one side was imitation wood and the other side was imitation marble.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

Fools, Learning, Appearance, Painting

“p>Time's right-hand man, the sea
Laughs as in joy
From his millions of wrinkles:
Laughs that his destiny,
Great with the greatness
Of triumphing order,
Shows as a dwarf
By the strength of his heart
And the might of his hands.Master of masters,
O maker of heroes,
Thunder the brave,
Irresistible message: —
'Life is worth Living
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

Source: Poems (1898), Rhymes And Rhythms, XIV

Life, Death, Time, Heart

“I raised my arms as if in prayer and heard the mutter of response behind me. Then I scattered the dried grains, red and brown and black, and studied the patterns they formed on the stone ledge before Sibbos. This is not such a mystic thing. You see what it is sensible to see, or else you interpret what you see so that the meaning comes out as you want it.”

Tanith Lee book The Birthgrave

Book Two, Part I “Across the Ring”, Chapter 3 (p. 155)
The Birthgrave (1975)

Study

“Every man will have his own criterion in forming his judgment of others. I depend very much on the effect of affliction. I consider how a man comes out of the furnace; gold will lie for a month in the furnace without losing a grain.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 9.

Lie, Affliction, Dependency

“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

“Doing the opposite might make you feel uncomfortable. It can be scary and make you feel lonely and exposed. It is never easy to be seen as going against the grain and ignoring the advice of your colleagues, friends or family, but if you are prepared to explain what you are doing and why, they will come round.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Family, Feeling

“I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“The Crooked Wood” p. 208
The Journey Home (1977)

Life, People, Understanding, Dependency

“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity.”

Truman Capote book In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood (1965)

Bird, Time

“He took their facts for granted. He knew no more than a firefly about rays — or about race or sex — or ennui — or a bar of music — or a pang of love — or a grain of musk — or of phosphorus — or conscience — or duty — or the force of Euclidian geometry — or non-Euclidian — or heat — or light — or osmosis — or electrolysis — or the magnet — or ether — or vis inertiae — or gravitation — or cohesion — or elasticity — or surface tension — or capillary attraction — or Brownian motion — or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and without him; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore some dozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond his intelligence.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Love, Music, Sex, Intelligence

“To hoard surpluses of grain and other food products at a time when the people in Petrograd, in Moscow, and in dozens of non-agricultural uyezds are not only suffering from a shortage of bread, but are cruelly starving, is an enormous crime deserving the most ruthless punishment.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 42, pp. 94–95.
Collected Works

People, Food, Suffering, Time

“Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

Shelley. In the Dublin Review (July 1908).

Love, Life, Death, World

“Well says the proverb, that it is better to live with wild beasts in caves, than in the same house with a cross-grained and quarrelsome woman.”

Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) Italian poet and litterateur

(Ben dice il proverblo ch’) egli è megllo abitare colle fiere in le spilonche, che avere in casa una femmina litlgiosa e perversa.
Act I., Scene II. — (Lucido Tolto).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 297.
I Lucidi (published 1549)

Housing

“Joh. Mayor, in the first book of his "History of Scotland," contends much for the wholesomeness of oaten bread; it was objected to him, then living at Paris, that his countrymen fed on oats and base grain…. And yet Wecker out of Galen calls it horse-meat, and fitter juments than men to feed on.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 2, subsection 1.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I

Men, Books, History, Horse

“A dense film of a conventional surfactant is quite impermeable. On the other hand, a dense film of Janus grains always has some interstices between the grains, and allows for chemical exchange between the two sides; "the skin can breathe."”

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (1932–2007) French Physicist

This may possibly be of some practical interest.
"Soft Matter" Nobel lecture (9 December 1991)

“Earth, thou grain of sand on the shore of the Universe of God; thou Bethlehem, amongst the princely cities of the heavens; thou art, and remainest, the Loved One amongst ten thousand suns and worlds, the Chosen of God! Thee will He again visit, and then thou wilt prepare a throne for Him, as thou gavest Him a manger cradle; in His radiant glory wilt thou rejoice, as thou didst once drink His blood and tears, and mourn His death! On thee has the Lord a great work to complete.”

Wilhelm von Pressel (1821–1902) German official and railway engineer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 102.

Love, Death, God, World

“The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our lives how impossible that is. How, then, can there be a "social science"? The answer, surely, is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)

People, Truth, World, Nature

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life, Death, World, Change

“Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 160

World, Reality, Chance, Sea

“Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. … when nonvegetarians say that “human problems come first” I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 6: Speciesism Today

Money, People, Support, Problem

“Most men give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Misattributed
Source: William R(ounseville) Alger, American clergyman and writer [1822-1905]; reported in Raphael Lewin, Ed., The New Era (1872), Volume 2, p. 315.

Men

“Apart from the positive woes of perdition, an eternity of wretchedness grows from the want of love to Christ as naturally as the oak grows from the acorn, or the harvest from the scattered grain. It is not that love to Christ merits heaven; it does far better, it makes heaven. It is, as it were, the organ of sensation that takes note of heaven's blessedness.”

Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd (1825–1899) British writer and minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 401.

Love, Nature, Christ

“I recalled the ants I had watched as a child on the farm, building their hills one grain of sand at a time, only to have them senselessly destroyed in an instant by a passing foot. I'd pieced my life together the same way, slowly and agonizingly. Would it, too, be kicked callously into dust?”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 214
2000s, (2008)

Life, Way, Time

“I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter I: The Earth; 1. The Starting Point (p. 11)

Men, Hunger, History, Star

“The societal decision to reduce beef will profoundly affect the economics of human survival in the coming century. In the new world that is coming, millions of human beings will voluntarily choose to eat lower on the food chain so that millions of others may obtain the minimum food calories they need to sustain their lives. This grand redistribution of the earth's bounty, the most far-reaching in history, will unite the human race in a new fraternal bond. A new species awareness will begin where the rich meet the poor on the descending rungs of the world's protein ladder. The decision to eat further down on the planet's food chain will force a wholesale reassessment of the entire grain-fed meat complex ranging from factory farm chickens to hogs. The collapse of the global cattle complex will likely precipitate a chain reaction, resulting in the elimination of other grain-fed meats from the human diet. The dissolution of the commercial cattle complex will spare the rich and might help save the poor. Eliminating grain-fed beef and eating lower on the food chain will dramatically reduce the incidence of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), p. 290

World, Disease, Food, History

“Private shops [in Soviet Russia]... are taxed higher than co-operatives, are granted less favorable concessions, and enjoy a grudging legality. Nevertheless, their owners often make a great deal of money. The only explanation for it is the shortage of goods and the hunger for them. When one asks for the explanation of such a phenomenon in an agricultural country one is told: The government is exporting grain, the milk or egg price is too low and the peasants are holding back.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "The New Russia" 1928, p. 23

Money, Hunger, Country

“Andrea presented herself as a street fighter intellectual, a bohemian freedom fighter, and someone who wanted to get to the bottom of things. That quote about Malcolm X is apt. Malcolm pointed out “The problem is WHITE PEOPLE.” Dworkin said, “The problem is MEN.” And for all the holes that can be poked in that cloth, there is something about that grain that is absolutely true, when you are the short end of the bolt.”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

" Andrea Dworkin Has Died http://susiebright.blogs.com/susie_brights_journal_/2005/04/andrea_dworkin_.html", Susie Bright's Journal (blog), April 11, 2005.

Men, People, Quotes, Problem

“Yet many Americans who have reluctantly given up their gas-guzzling cars would never think of questioning the resource costs of their grain-fed-meat diet. So let me try to give you some sense of the enormity of the resources flowing into livestock production in the United States. The consequences of a grain-fed-meat diet may be as severe as those of a nation of Cadillac drivers.”

Frances Moore Lappé book Diet for a Small Planet

Source: Diet for a Small Planet, p. 66

Cars, Question, Thinking, Sense

“The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U. S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 75-76

People, Disease, School, Food

“When I make an album I take a lot of risks. I ignore the trends of the moment and one of the things I have to think of when making an album like this is the honesty of it. To connect. It goes against the grain. It's nice to know I can go against the grain.”

Josh Groban (1981) American musician and actor

Miami Herald, 4/23/04

Thinking

“The evidence of religion — ah, I know where the true evidence lies, by the pleadings of my own heart against me. Why, why must it be that all these alien histories, these strange theories and doctrines, should be all sown in together in the child seed-bed with the pure grain of Christianity? so that in after years it is impossible to root them out without trampling over rudely on the good. And we must do it. They may be harmless, growing there unrecognised; but, known for what they are, their poison opens then, and they or we must die.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter III
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Religion, History, Heart

“In both the kinds of land we have been considering [i. e., classes of very fertile soil, rich in humus], we have supposed the humus to be mild, or exempt from acidity. J Sour or acid humus totally destroys the fertility of a soil; sometimes, however, the soil contains so very small a portion of acidity that its fertility is very slightly diminished, and only with regard to some few plants. Barley crops become more and more scanty in proportion as the acidity is increased; but oats do not appear to be at all affected by it. Rye grown on such land is peculiarly liable to rust, and is easily laid or lodged. The grains of all the oereals become larger, but contain less farina. Grass which grows on these spots is, both in species and taste, less agreeable, and less suitable for cattle, than any other, although it yields a very considerable produce in hay. In fact, in exact proportion with the increase of acidity, is the decrease of the value of the soil…”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

p. 345 http://books.google.com/books?id=zAhJAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA345, as cited in Ruffin (1852, p. 85). The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section III: Agronomy

Grass, Appearance

“Identify an agrarian problem—greenhouse gas emissions, overuse of antibiotics and dangerous pesticides, genetically modified crops, salmonella, E. coli, waste disposal, excessive use of water—and trace it to its ultimate origin and you will likely find an animal. … Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. … But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.””

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Loving Animals to Death: How Can We Raise Them Humanely and Then Butcher Them?", in The American Scholar (Spring 2014) https://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/.

Food, Problem, Water, Time

“Patel's presidential address to the Congress, 1931: No one would die of starvation in independent India. Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place 7,000 feet above sea level. Its military expenditure would not be heavy. Its army would not subjugate its own people or other lands. Its best-paid officials would not earn a great deal more than its lowest-paid servants. And finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult.”

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950) Indian freedom fighter who forged united India

Gandhi, Rajmohan. Patel: A Life, p. 92

People, Justice, Sea, Clothes

“This book is about three Frenchmen who lived and wrote against the grain of these three ages of irresponsibility. They were very different men and would have been surprised to think of themselves as a group, yet they have something rather distinctive in common. All three played an important role in the France of their lifetime but lived at a slightly awkward tangent to their contemporaries. For much of his adult life each was an object of dislike, suspicion, contempt, or hatred for many of his peers and contemporaries; only at the end of their long lives were Léon Blum and Raymond Aron, for quite different reasons, able to relax into the comfort of near-universal admiration, respect, and, in some quarters, adulation. Camus, who had experienced all three by the age of thirty-five, died twelve years later an insecure and much-maligned figure; it would be thirty years before his reputation would recover.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

Life, Men, Books, Age

Quotes about grain page 2

Quotes about grain
page 2