Quotes about oat (23 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The growing extravagance of the people, and the increasing demand for the article of forage in this quarter, have become a very alarming affair. Hay is from sixty to eighty dollars a ton, and upon the rise.* Corn is ten dollars a bushel, and oats four; and every thing else, that will answer for forage, in that proportion. Carting is nine shillings a mile by the ton, and people much dissatisfied with the price. I have represented to the States of Rhode Island and Connecticut the absolute necessity of legislative interposition, to settle the prices of things upon some reasonable footing, of all such articles and services as are necessary for the use of the public in my department. I am going to do the same to the Council of this State. What effect it will have, I cannot say; but, if there is not something done to check the extravagance of the people, there are no funds in the universe that will equal the expense.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

People , Universe

“Who the heck is Don Quick-oats?”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

“Some kids do drugs. Some kids light stuff on fire. Me, I eat oats.”

Jordan Sonnenblick After Ever After

Source: After Ever After

Light

“She was feeling her bohemian oats.”

Steve Martin book Shopgirl

Source: Shopgirl

Feeling

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

"Recession Economics," New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 1 (4 February 1982)
Context: Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy— what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.

Horse

“OATS — A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”

Samuel Johnson book A Dictionary of the English Language

A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

People , Support , Horse

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Grass , Water , Past

“The state of affairs in other Countries, which claim to be more highly advanced and progressive, is much worse. There it is stated that no man or woman approaches Marriage as a virgin. This is the direct result of provocative publicity. The case of the male is perhaps worse, for he boasts he cannot even recollect the number or wild oats he has sown and which is considered as a Passport to manhood (sic). Others again have disgraced their humanity in disgusting unnatural offences, which they are now trying to make their Governments legalise, and finally others again are subject to the Oedipus complex.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Promiscuity & Continence

Marriage , Country

“Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.”

Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

“I was so lucky to have been surrounded by really great actors. Everybody in that movie was a real actor: Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Richard Dreyfuss, Harry Dean Stanton. It was just a wonderful, wonderful experience for me and I had so much support and so much help and so much encouragement.”

Michelle Phillips (1944) Singer, actress

On her first acting role in Dillinger (1973), The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chats-with-esperanza-spalding-michelle-phillips-lee_us_57b32bc0e4b0567d4f130aab (August 25, 2016)

Support , Help

“In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence (1920), Ch. 31

Season

“A lot of the old movie stars couldn't act their way out of a box of wet tissue paper, but they were successful because they had distinctive personalities. They were predictable brands of breakfast cereal: on Wednesdays we had Quaker Oats and Gary Cooper; on Fridays we had Wheaties and Clark Gable. They were off-the-shelf products you expected always to be the same, actors and actresses with likable personalities who played themselves more or less the same role the same way every time out.”

Marlon Brando (1924–2004) American screen and stage actor

Way , Star , Time , Success

“So, come all you young men. with your wicked, wicked ways. Sow your wild oats in your younger days. So that we may be happy when we grow old. Yes! happy and happy when we grow old. For the day's getting on and the night's getting long. Darling please gimme your arm and we'll joggle along, yes, we'll joggle and joggle and joggle along.”

Errol Flynn (1909–1959) Australian actor

From his autobiography My Wicked Wicked Ways - 1959

Men , Way , Night , Happiness

“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)

“There was a young fellow from Ankara
Who was a terrific wankerer
Till he sowed his wild oats
With the help of a goat
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

Boris Johnson wins The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, 18 May 2016. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/boris-johnson-wins-the-spectators-president-erdogan-offensive-poetry-competition/
About

Help

“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

“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

“Ginger: I can't do this, Lois! I can't go out with a woman who has a child! I'm too young, I tell you! I haven't sown my oats yet!
Lois: I think your oats are impacted.”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#370, "Not-for-Profit Motive" (2001), collected in Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life Forms TWOF (2003).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Thinking

“I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?"”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

I don't need that question answered.
Paris Review Interview (1986)

Question , Time

“There was a young fellow from Ankara
Who was a terrific wankerer
Till he sowed his wild oats
With the help of a goat
But he didn’t even stop to thankera.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Boris Johnson wins The Spectator’s President Erdogan Offensive Poetry competition, 18 May 2016. http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/boris-johnson-wins-the-spectators-president-erdogan-offensive-poetry-competition/
2010s, 2016

Help

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Time , Business , Past

“Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic policy—what an older and less elegant generation called the horse-and-sparrow theory: If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

"Recession Economics," New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 1 (4 February 1982)

Horse

“According to Sir Anthony Fitzherbert it was the custom in England to shear wheat and rye and to leave the straw standing after the third method described by Varro, the purpose being to preserve the straw to be cut later for thatching, as threshing It would necessarily destroy its value for thatching. It was the custom in England, however, to mow barley and oats.”

Anthony Fitzherbert (1470–1538) English judge, scholar and legal author

A Virginia farmer (translator) (1913) in Varro's Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres https://archive.org/stream/cu31924062805209#page/n181/mode/2up/search/husbandry, p. 161-2.