Quotes about plow (74 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, plows and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts, Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialised task will do it best.”

Xenophon book Cyropaedia

Cyropaedia, 4th Century BC

Women , Men , Food , Shoe

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

Children , Color , Game , Coffee

“In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.”

Lee Iacocca (1924–2019) American businessman

For Team , Business , Time , Anger

“… it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.”

Steve Martin book Shopgirl

Source: Shopgirl

Question , Heart , Hurt

“All who have served the Revolution have plowed the sea.”

Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) Venezuelan military and political leader, South American libertador

Statement written in his final days, as quoted in Simón Bolívar : A Story of Courage (1941) by Elizabeth Dey Jenkinson Waugh, p. 320; These are sometimes said to have been repeated many times while he was dying, and to be his last words.
Variant translations or reports:
America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea.
As quoted in Man, State, and Society in Latin American History (1972) by Sheldon B. Liss and Peggy K. Liss, p. 133
Those who have served the cause of the revolution have plowed the sea.
We have plowed the sea.
I plowed furrows in the ocean.
I have plowed the sea. Our America will fall into the hands of vulgar tyrants.

Sea

“We must plow through the whole of language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

“In business as well, if you are to be successful you must always win. An enterprise will grow in accordance with the amount of effort you plow into it.”

Matsushita Konosuke (1894–1989) Japanese businessman

Source: Quest for prosperity: the life of a Japanese industrialist. 1988, p. 58

Business , Effort , Success

“Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s Liberty teeth and keystone under Independence. The church, the plow, the prairie wagon, and citizens’ firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this Land knows firearms and more than 99 99/100 per cent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference and they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good. When firearms go all goes, therefore we need them every hour.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

This is the conclusion to an article entitled "Older Ideas of Firearms" by C. S. Wheatley; it was published in the September 1926 issue of Hunter, Trader, Trapper (vol. 53, no. 3), p. 34. Wheatley had referred to George Washington's address to the second session of the first Congress immediately before this passage, which may have given rise to the mistaken attribution. See this piece http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/02/26/firearm/ at Quote Investigator
Misattributed

People , Peace , Silence , Evil

“[T]he Jewish people were driven by their drunkenness and plumpness to the ultimate evil; they kicked about, they failed to accept the yoke of Christ, nor did they pull the plow of his teaching. Another prophet hinted at this when he said: "Israel is as obstinate as a stubborn heifer." … Although such beasts are unfit for work, they are fit for killing. And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter. This is why Christ said: "But as for these my enemies, who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slay them."”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Luke 19:27
Eight Homilies Against the Jews http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html, Homily 1

People , Evil , Christ

“From this place he removed to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in the autumn of 1816. Abraham then being in his eighth year. …though very young, was large for his age, and had an ax put into his hands at once; and from that till within his twenty-third year he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument — less, of course, in plowing and harvesting seasons.”

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

1860s, A Short Autobiography (1860)

Age , Autumn , Season

“Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

According to the Jefferson Library, this is misattributed to Jefferson http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Those_who_hammer_their_guns_into_plows.
Misattributed

“They will never shoulder a musket again in anger, and if Grant is wise, he will leave them their guns to shoot crows with and their horses to plow with. It would do no harm.”

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

Regarding the treatment of former Confederate soldiers. In Richmond, Virginia (April 4, 1865), as quoted in Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War https://archive.org/download/incidentsanecdot00port/incidentsanecdot00port.pdf (1885), by David Dixon Porter, p. 312
1860s, Tour of Richmond (1865)

Horse , Anger

“You know what would help this boy?" Demeter mused. "Farming."
Persephone rolled her eyes. "Mother-"
"Six months behind a plow. Excellent character building.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Boy , Help

“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rotting bull. I dinna understand myself.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

Understanding

“We ran, plowing through another pile of peppers. [No, I didn't pick a peck of them, Sadie - just shut up. ]”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit, confident that his course would throw up no obstacles so large that they could not be plowed over with sheer force of momentum.”

Donna Tartt book The Secret History

Source: The Secret History

World , Confidence , Light

“You know what’s a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up.
— Tiny Cooper”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Love , Beauty , Sleep

“I might be half Derek's size, but I was the one who sounded like a two-hundred-pound beast plowing through the woods.”

Kelley Armstrong The Reckoning

Source: The Reckoning

“Whoa!" she says as I plow into her. " What are you DOING? Get off me!" I hang on tight. "Can't a girl just hug her big sister?" She stops fighting me. "Are you dying? Am I dying? Did Grandma die? I laugh. "No one died." "Then get off!”

Wendy Mass (1967) American children's writer

Source: 11 Birthdays

Girl , Sister , Grandma , Fight

“you should first follow the plow if you want to dance the harvest jig.”

Ken Follett book World Without End

Source: World Without End

Dance

“There is more honor in a field well plowed than in a field steeped in blood.”

Lloyd Alexander book The Black Cauldron

Source: The Chronicles of Prydain (1964–1968), Book II: The Black Cauldron (1965), Chapter 3
Context: "I have marched in many a battle host," Adaon answered quietly, "but I have also planted seeds and reaped the harvest with my own hands. And I have learned there is greater honor in a field well plowed than in a field steeped in blood."

“When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening…. I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Books

“I always had a kind of Myth of Cincinnatus idea about politics — that public service was something you do for a while in between stints at real life. And when your time is up, you return to the plow, which is hopefully still somewhere close to where you left it.”

Angus King (1944) United States Senator from Maine

Governor's Travels : How I Left Politics, Learned to Back Up a Bus, and Found America (2011)

Life , Idea , Time

“On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, "If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn."”

James A. Michener book The Source

The Source (1965) First lines

History , Past , Night

“Any prairie farm can have a library of prairie plants, for they are drought-proof and fire-proof, and are content with any roadside, rocky knoll, or sandy hillside not needed for cow or plow. Unlike books, which divulge their meaning only when you dig for it, the prairie plants yearly repeat their story, in technicolor, from the first pale blooms of pasque in April to the wine-red plumes of bluestem in the fall. All but the blind may read, and gather from the reading new lessons in the meaning of America.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

" Roadside Prairies http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/AldoLeopold/AldoLeopold-idx?type=turn&entity=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile.p0123&id=AldoLeopold.ALDeskFile&isize=XL" [1941]; Published in For the Health of the Land, J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle (eds.), 1999, p. 138.
1940s

Books , Wine , Reading

“We live in a swiftly changing world. Industrial and water-engineering projects, cutting of forests, plowing up of virgin lands, the use of poisonous chemicals — all such activity is changing the face of the earth, our "habitat."
Scientific study of all the interrelationships in nature and the consequences of our interference clearly lags behind the changes. Large amounts of harmful wastes of industry and transport are being dumped into the air and water, including cancer-inducing substances. Will the safe limit be passed everywhere, as has already happened in a number of places?”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Pollution of Environment

World , Nature , Study , Water

“I marvel’d how Man, by his GOD-sent wit,
Thus tam’d the salamander Element
And loos’d the Metal in the mountain pent
To make us Saws, and Shears, and useful Plows,
Swords for our hands, and Helmets for our brows,
The surgeon’s Scalpel, vehicle of Health,
And all our humble Tools for gaining wealth...
”De Arte Munificente,” Seventeenth century”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

September “MOTHER-RAPERS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

God , Health , Art , Mountain

“You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?”

Thomas Friedman (1953) American journalist and author

The Earth Is Full, New York Times, June 7, 2011, June 26, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=3&ref=opinion,

World , Food , Nature , Thinking

“Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social conditioning influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 2

Law , Sex , Failure , Nature

“Genius is a steed too fiery for the plow or cart.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

“I love Russia as few people do - I've demonstrated it my whole life, but those who plow here in Russia, are not my brothers. I heed a Russian life with my entire existence, I look into the eyes of all the people around me, nothing... And the main horror is that we long for Russia and here no one loves her, they only mimic those feelings.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Werefkin to Jawlensky, 1909-1910, fond 19-1458, pp. 35–36 as reprinted in Lauchkaite-Surgailene, Lauchkaite-Surgailene, "Marianna Verevkina. Zhizn' v iskusstve," Vilnius, no. 3, sec. 15, 136
1906 - 1911

Love , Life , People , Feeling

“The plow has probably done more harm — in the long run — than the sword.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100

“When age hath made me what I am not now,
And every wrinkle tells me where the plow
Of time hath furrowed; when an ice shall flow
Through every vein, and all my head wear snow;
When death displays his coldness in my cheek,
And I myself in my own picture seek,
Not finding what I am, but what I was,
In doubt which to believe, this, or my glass;
Yet though I alter, this remains the same
As it was drawn, retains the primitive frame
And first complexion; here will still be seen
Blood on the cheek and down upon the chin:
Here the smooth brow will stay, the lively eye,
The ruddy lip, and hair of youthful dye.
Behold what frailty we in man may see,
Whose shadow is less given to change than he.”

Thomas Randolph (poet) (1605–1635) English poet and dramatist

"Upon his Picture"
Poems (pub. 1638)

Death , Youth , Age , Change

“What exactly did these words, of both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, mean? They meant that there was no difference, between one human being, and another human being, that made one the master and the other the servant. As Jefferson once put it, some men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor are others born booted and spurred to ride them. That a man or woman rides a horse corresponds with the difference in their natures. No injustice is done to the horse! That an ox should pull a plow, while a man walks behind, is according to nature. In these cases, servitude follows from the laws of nature. But these same laws of nature tell us that when a human being is subjected to other human beings as if he were a horse or an ox, the laws of nature are violated. All human beings are accordingly equal in their right not to be enslaved, and in their right to be in secure possession of their lives, liberties, and property. To this end they have a right to be governed only by laws to which they have consented.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), The American Proposition

Men , Law , Nature , Horse

“Ye rigid Plowmen! Bear in mind
Your labor is for future hours.
Advance! spare not! nor look behind!
Plow deep and straight with all your powers!”

Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884) English poet and critic

The Plow, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919); reported as The Plough in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 18-19.

Future

“Why are Gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why Gentiles were created.”

Ovadia Yosef (1920–2013) Israeli rabbi

19 October 2010 article on Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782
2010

“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

“From the time of the Revolutionary War, when citizens stood forward to defend their liberties against the depredations of tyranny, all the way through Civil War, through the great World Wars, this nation has been defended by the tradition of common ordinary folks who come from behind the plow, come from the store-clerking, come from the classrooms to get on the battlefields — ordinary citizens turned into heroes in defense of their liberty, because that's the potential of freedom.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Rally in Idaho Falls, Idaho, May 12, 2000. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/00_05_12idahofalls.htm.
2000

War , World , Way , Freedom

“Some scoffers have asked, “Where are the pre-Flood civilizations? If there was an entire civilization that was destroyed in the Flood of Noah, why don’t we find their cities, highways or machines as we dig in the earth?” That’s a fair question, but it is based on a false premise. What type of stuff would they need in a perfect world? If the weather was perfect and the animals were friendly and food was abundant and free and everyone was vegetarian, what would they need? They wouldn’t need houses to be protected from weather, climate, or animals. I don't see why they would need buildings of any kind! If the earth was producing enormous quantities of food from pole to pole, they wouldn’t need tractors, plows nor a highway system, nor vehicles to move food and goods from one region to another. They wouldn’t need lots of things we need for survival and protection today.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 56

World , Food , Question , Animals

“Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives,—a day of massacre, of perfidy, of bloodshed and butchery. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, p. 186

Children , Confidence , Kiss , Winter

“The presidency is seemingly bound by law, but in practice it can do just about anything it pleases. It can order up troops anywhere in the world, just as Clinton bragged in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. It can plow up a religious community in Texas and bury its members because they got on somebody’s nerves at the Justice Department. It can tap our phones, read our mail, watch our bank accounts, and tell us what we can and cannot eat, drink, and smoke.
The presidency can break up businesses, shut down airlines, void drilling leases, bribe foreign heads of state or arrest them and try them in kangaroo courts, nationalize land, engage in germ warfare, firebomb crops in Colombia, overthrow any government anywhere, erect tariffs, round up and discredit any public or private assembly it chooses, grab our guns, tax our incomes and our inheritances, steal our land, centrally plan the national and world economy, and impose embargoes on anything anytime. No prince or pope ever had this ability.”

Lew Rockwell (1944) American libertarian author and editor

6 October 1996 "Down With the Presidency"
1990s

World , Justice , Law , Communication

“That's the way beauty is found, by accident [referring to the Glass house he lived in, with the family]. You don't recognize it when you are looking for it, and you won't find it by looking in a magazine. It's right here in the moon, the stars, the horizon, the snow formations... In this house we can see all those things. But what I miss are the songs in the fields. No one sings them any more because everyone has become a little businessman. And there are no more plows. I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Love , Family , Beauty , Way

“Of course, sometimes a species’ invention only benefited itself. Goats developed an ability to eat almost anything, right down to the roots. Goats proliferated. Deserts spread behind them.
Then another creature appeared, one whose originality was unprecedented. Its numbers grew. And in its wake some other types did flourish. The common cat and dog. The rat. Starlings and pigeons. And the cockroach. Meanwhile, opportunity grew sparse for those less able to share the vast new riches—huge expanses of plowed fields and mowed lawns, streets and parking lots…
The coming of the grasses had left its mark indelibly on the history of the world.
So would the Age of Asphalt and Concrete.”

David Brin book Earth

Part II (p. 122)
Earth (1990)

Age , World , Dogs , History

“Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

" During Wind and Rain http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/96.html", lines 27-28, from Moments of Vision (1917)

“[H]aving problems is not a license to vote stupid. People need the tractor to plow the damn field, now.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Debriefing Mike Murphy" https://www.weeklystandard.com/matt-labash/debriefing-mike-murphy (18 March 2016), by Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard
2010s

People , Stupidity , Problem

“Don't let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is and even if it's cracked up a little bit, maybe I'll just plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don't let me miss an open door. And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

On her considering a future run for the office of President of the United States, November 10, 2008 http://alaskareport.com/news1108/x61753_palin_2012.htm
2014

Family

“5968. You must plow with such Oxen as you have.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“Cultivate friendships. If you don’t have time to cultivate all of them, plow under every fifth one and collect your bonus.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

Source: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 6 : How not to offend anybody

Friendship , Time

“Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plow the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Source: America for Me (1909), Lines 21-24.

Home , Star , Sea

“Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves t' have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel plows air.”

George Chapman The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron

Act III, scene i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608)

Love , Life , Drink , Water

“Democracy makes Rumanian citizens out of millions of Jews by making them the Rumanians' equals. By giving them the same legal rights. Equality? What for? We have been here for thousands of years. Plow and weapon in hand. With our labors and blood. Why equality with those who have been here for only one hundred, ten, or even five years? Let's look at the past: We created this state. Let's look at the future: We Rumanians are fully responsible for Greater Rumania. They have nothing to do with it. What could be the responsibility of Jews, in the history books, for the disappearance of the Rumanian state? Thus: no equality in labor, sacrifice, and struggle for the creation of the state and no equal responsibility for its future. Equality? According to an old maxim: Equality is to treat unequally the unequal. What are the reasons for the Jews' demanding equal treatment, equal political rights with the Rumanians?”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Books , Democracy , History , Past

“A sillie swaine, passing over an arm of the sea with his seede corne in a sacke, by mischance at the landing, his sacke fell into the water, and so his corne being lefte there till the next low water, became somewhat brackish, yet such was the necessity of the man, as that he (notwithstanding hee was out of all hope to have any good successe thereby, yet not being able to buie any other) bestowed the same wheat upon his plowed groundes, by the advice of a gentleman of good worship from whence I received the report thereof, and in June when the harvest time came about, he reaped a rich crop of goodly wheat such as in that yeare not any of his neighbours had the like, and yet notwithstanding (for aught that ever I could yet learne) neither he nor any other of his countrimen would ever adventure to make any further use thereof, belike being perswaded, unless that the corne by chance fell into the sea, it would never fructifie.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Hope , Learning , Water , Chance

“Blessed in sleep and satisfied to languish, to embrace shadows, and to pursue the summer breeze, I swim through a sea that has no floor or shore, I plow the waves and found my house on sand and write on the wind.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Beato in sogno et di languir contento,
d'abbracciar l'ombre et seguir l'aura estiva,
nuoto per mar che non à fondo o riva,
solco onde, e 'n rena fondo, et scrivo in vento.
Canzone 212, st. 1
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Sleep , Summer , Housing , Sea

“If Ali says a mosquito can pull a plow, don't ask how. Hitch him up.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

As quoted in "Muhammad Ali" by George Plimpton in "The TIME 100" in TIME (14 June 1999) http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/ali01.html

“In the summer of 1864, pessimists warned that the North could not win the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln faced opposition for the Republican-party nomination, and even if he won it, he was considered likely to lose the November election to Union general George McClellan. General Grant’s Army of the Potomac was being bled white in Virginia in vain attempts to dislodge Robert E. Lee’s defenders from their entrenchments around the Confederate capital of Richmond. Gruesome encounters such as the Battle of Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Wilderness had given the depressed Northern public nightmares. Then, suddenly, fantasy became reality. The maverick General William Tecumseh Sherman unexpectedly took Atlanta on September 2, 1864. Euphoria swept the North. McClellan’s sure-thing candidacy crashed. The mercurial Sherman then headed off with his huge army on the famous “March to the Sea” through Georgia. He next plowed through the Carolinas to the rear of Lee’s army in Virginia. In less than nine months the entire Confederate cause collapsed. The supposedly endless Civil War ended with a sudden and absolute Union victory that no one had foreseen.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, The American Art of Renewal (2018)

War , Reality , Victory , Summer

“Tom Chaney rode his gray horse that was better suited to pulling a middlebuster than carrying a rider. He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you. He could have taken an old piece of harness and made a nice leather strap for it. That would have been too much trouble.”

Charles Portis book True Grit

Source: True Grit (1968), Chapter 1, p. 12 : thoughts of 'Mattie Ross'

Horse

“Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.”

Hal Varian (1947) American economist

The structure of the Internet http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Future-of-the-Internet-IV/Part-4Architecture.aspx?r=1, a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2010.
"Part 1: A review of responses to a tension pair about whether Google will make people stupid."

People , World , Universe , Personality

“Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Minnesota declaration (1999)

Truth

“I am a farmer singing at the plow”

Jesse Stuart (1907–1984) American writer

Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, first line of the poem (1934)

Singing

“Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps — there was only the Syrian army… The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land … and they dreamed about it… They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land… We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was…The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”

Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) Israeli military leader and politician

On pre-1967 clashes with the Syrians, from a private conversation in 1976 with Rami Tal, as quoted in The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/11/world/general-s-words-shed-a-new-light-on-the-golan.html?scp=1&sq=Moshe%20Dayan%20Rami%20Tal&st=cse and Associated Press reports (11 May 1997)

War , Dreams

“It is now spring of the year, and you have all had the privilege of being taught the way of God; and now you may all go home and be faithful with your hands. Every faithful man will go forth and put up his fences in season, and will plow his ground in season, and put his crops into the ground in season; and such a man may with confidence look for a blessing.”

Ann Lee (1736–1784) English Shaker leader

The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875)

God , Faith , Way , Home

“Within your heart in a space no bigger than an atom, God has placed the 18,000 universes, good and evil, and the wisdom to differentiate between them. That is your farmland. If you plow that land deep with your wisdom and sow God's qualities and actions with the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, you will receive the wealth of your soul, the bountiful harvest of undiminishing grace.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

Wisdom , God , Soul , Knowledge

“Unfortunately in our education system youngsters are still not given sufficient encouragement to go into industry or commerce and not told that it is a good thing to make an honest profit. They should be told that if you don't make a profit, you won't be in business very long because you haven't anything to plow back for tomorrow. You make your profit by pleasing others so you have to make it honestly.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Interview for Director magazine (4 July 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105182, quoted in Chris Ogden, Maggie: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 345.
Second term as Prime Minister

Education , Business

“Euryalus
In death went reeling down,
And blood streamed on his handsome length, his neck
Collapsing let his head fall on his shoulder—
As a bright flower cut by a passing plow
Will droop and wither slowly, or a poppy
Bow its head upon its tired stalk
When overborne by a passing rain.”
Volvitur Euryalus leto, pulchrosque per artus It cruor inque umeros cervix conlapsa recumbit: Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro Languescit moriens; lassove papavera collo Demisere caput, pluvia cum forte gravantur.

Virgil Aeneid

Compare:
Μήκων δ' ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ' ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ' ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν.
He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm's weight.
Homer, Iliad, VIII, 306–308 (tr. R. Lattimore)
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book IX, Lines 433–437 (tr. Fitzgerald)

Death , Flowers

“Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

Native Son (1940)

Life , Men , Hate , People

“This is how evil thrives. We find an herb that cures disease, and someone will make a poison from it. We forge iron to make a better plow, and someone will make a sharper sword. There can be no power that evil will not corrupt.”

David Gemmell book The Swords of Night and Day

Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 21
Context: "No golden age to discover now," he whispered. "No end to disease and starvation. No, bright sparkling cities reaching the clouds... All that I have lived for is gone now. I am so tired.""Then think on this, priest: You stopped the Eternal from finding greater weapons. Your actions here have led to her death. The world is free again.""Free? Of one tyrant perhaps. You think there will be no others?""No, I do not. But I know there will always be men to stand against them. You grieve because of a pure magic lost. That magic was corrupted by evil. This is how evil thrives. We find an herb that cures disease, and someone will make a poison from it. We forge iron to make a better plow, and someone will make a sharper sword. There can be no power that evil will not corrupt."

Disease , Evil

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1850s, West India Emancipation (1857)
Context: Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [... ] Men might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

Men , Freedom , Water

“A man has a right to work with his hands, to plow the earth, to sow the seed, and that man has a right to reap the harvest. If we have not that right, then all are slaves except those who take these rights from their fellow-men.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: The question to be tried by you is whether a man has the right to express his honest thought; and for that reason there can be no case of greater importance submitted to a jury. And it may be well enough for me, at the outset, to admit that there could be no case in which I could take a greater — a deeper interest. For my part, I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.
I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.
A man has a right to work with his hands, to plow the earth, to sow the seed, and that man has a right to reap the harvest. If we have not that right, then all are slaves except those who take these rights from their fellow-men.

Men

“Instead of clinging to the sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance, ours to march out to newly plowed fields, to create fresh patterns of political action, to alter for human purposes the perverse mechanisms or our economic regime, to conceive and to germinate fresh forms of human culture.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Introduction
The Culture of Cities (1938)
Context: Today our world faces a crisis: a crisis which, if its consequences are as grave as now seems, may not fully be resolved for another century. If the destructive forces in civilization gain ascendancy, our new urban culture will be stricken in every part. Our cities, blasted and deserted, will be cemeteries for the dead: cold lairs given over to less destructive beasts than man. But we may avert that fate: perhaps only in facing such a desperate challenge can the necessary creative forces be effectually welded together. Instead of clinging to the sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance, ours to march out to newly plowed fields, to create fresh patterns of political action, to alter for human purposes the perverse mechanisms or our economic regime, to conceive and to germinate fresh forms of human culture.
Instead of accepting the stale cult of death that the Fascists have erected, as the proper crown for the servility and brutality that are the pillars of their states, we must erect a cult of life: life in action, as the farmer or mechanic knows it: life in expression, as the artist knows it: life as the lover feels it and the parent practices it: life as it is known to men of good will who meditate in the cloister, experiment in the laboratory, or plan intelligently in the factory or the government office.

“They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Speech on Religious Intolerance as presented at the Pittsburgh Opera House (14 October 1879).
Context: They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.

Religion , Thinking , Dead

“The history of culture shows that foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. It does not flourish on the fields of pure ignorance but on the fields tirelessly plowed by doctors and professors. Great absurdities do not flourish where one is busy with everyday life. No wonder that sometimes most vigorous thinkers come up with utmost stupidities.”

Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) Polish writer

Life , Wisdom , Stupidity , History

“The Vietnam War was raging at that particular time, so I wanted to do a positive play about a country character who was yearning for his home, as I was doing at Christmas…I drew on my experience growing up in the country - plowing mules, cropping tobacco, bootleggers, going to church. The rest was my imagination. I wanted to do something that could be performed on the streets - I love street theater. And I wanted my character to have a conscience.”

Samm-Art Williams (1946) American playwright and screenwriter

On what inspired him to write the play Home in “Lyrical, Uplifting HOME by Samm-Art Williams Comes to ICT” https://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/Lyrical-Uplifting-HOME-by-Samm-Art-Williams-Comes-to-ICT-20170915 in Broadway World: Los Angeles (2017 Sep 15)

Home , Time , Imagination , Country

“We are a poor country that wants to take the efforts and resources now being invested in defense of the revolution and invest it in tractors and plows. And we support general and complete disarmament, under strict international control. We are for an end to the arms race and we salute the SALT II accords as an important step in this direction. We demand respect for the territorial integrity of states and renunciation of the use of force in international relations. We condemn the existence of military bases.”

Daniel Ortega (1945) President of Nicaragua

Nothing Will Hold Back Our Struggle for Liberation (1979)

Support , Effort , Relation ships , Country

“You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.
You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.
You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother's hair?
I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother.”

Smohalla (1815–1895) Native American prophet-dreamer

As quoted in The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (1890) by James Mooney on page 721; it has been sometimes also ascribed to w:Wovoka, which seems misappropriated as Mooney himself mentions Wovoka in the same book from page 765 on.
"It is perhaps the most commonly cited piece of evidence documenting the Native American belief in Mother Earth. […]They rarely place the statement in the context in which Mooney presented it, that is, the history of millenarian movements spawned in part by the pressures Native American felt from the European-Americans' insatiable desire for land […] it is a direct response to 'white' pressures placed on native relationships with the land." From Mother Earth. An American Story. https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5975950.html

Home , Waiting , Dead , Grass