Quotes about wheat

A collection of quotes on the topic of wheat, time, timing, use.

Quotes about wheat

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Powerful, People, Thinking, Grass

“Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) British philosopher

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Life, Dreams, Flowers

“Here everything is dark. A series of storms has destroyed all our hopes which were full of promise. A plentiful hay harvest drowned and the finest wheat the farmers have had for years all laid. It is a scene of ravage, of havoc like a conquered country. It is the last drop in the bitter cup which the landed interest will have to swallow. … As for politics, Gladstone will be as fatal to the aristocracy as the weather; and if he were younger the Crown would not be safe.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Lady Chesterfield (19 July 1880), quoted in the Marquis of Zetland (ed.), The Letters of Disraeli to Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield. Vol. II, 1876 to 1881 (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1929), p. 282.

Hope, Weather, Country

“Of course it's tempting to close one's eyes to history, and instead speculate about the roots of war in some possible animal instinct: as if, like the tiger, we still had to kill to live, or, like the robin redbreast, to defend a nesting territory. But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began 10,000 years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. The evidence for that, we saw, in the walled city of Jericho and its prehistoric tower… That is the beginning of war.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

Episode 2: "The Harvest of the Seasons"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

War, History, Animals

“And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, […] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; […] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, […] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 46-47, "All at One Point".
Cosmicomics (1965)

Love, World, Mountain, Star

“There is a value called “mind” as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can “follow” it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world’s general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 161

World

“Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. 'Mostly by one country badly offending another,' answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. 'A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.' 'Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?' growls Kropp. 'I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other—' 'Then I haven't any business here at all,' replies Tjaden, 'I don't feel myself offended.' 'Well, let me tell you,' says Albert sourly,' it doesn't apply to tramps like you.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

'Then I can be going home right away,' retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh.
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ch. 9

War, People, Stupidity, Feeling

“I say, then, assuming, as I have given you reason to assume, that the price of wheat, when this system is established, ranges in England at 35s. per quarter, and other grain in proportion, this is not a question of rent, but it is a question of displacing the labour of England that produces corn, in order, on an extensive and even universal scale, to permit the entrance into this country of foreign corn produced by foreign labour. Will that displaced labour find new employment? … But what are the resources of this kind of industry to employ and support the people, supposing the great depression in agricultural produce occur which is feared—that this great revolution, as it has appropriately been called, takes place—that we cease to be an agricultural people—what are the resources that would furnish employment to two-thirds of the subverted agricultural population—in fact, from 3,500,000 to 4,000,000 of people? Assume that the workshop of the world principle is carried into effect—assume that the attempt is made to maintain your system, both financial and domestic, on the resources of the cotton trade—assume that, in spite of hostile tariffs, that already gigantic industry is doubled…you would only find increased employment for 300,000 of your population…What must be the consequence? I think we have pretty good grounds for anticipating social misery and political disaster.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1846/may/15/corn-importation-bill-adjourned-debate in the House of Commons (15 May 1846). 1840s

Hostility, People, World, Fear

“For Russia, therefore, this building of heavy industries at a tremendous pace meant a very great sacrifice. All this construction, all this machinery that came from outside, had to be paid for, and paid for in gold and cash. How was this to be done? The people of the Soviet Union tightened their belts and starved and deprived themselves of even necessary articles so that payment could be made abroad. They sent their food-stuffs abroad, and with the price obtained for them paid for the machinery. They sent everything they could find a market for: wheat, rye, barley, corn, vegetables, fruits, eggs, butter, meat, fowls, honey, fish, caviare, sugar, oils, confectionery, etc. Sending these food articles outside meant that they themselves did without them. The Russian people had no butter, or very little of it, because it went abroad to pay for machinery. And so with many other goods…”

Jawaharlal Nehru book Glimpses of World History

Glimpses of World History (1949)

Fish, People, Food

“Mrs. Daugherty was keeping my bowl of cream of wheat hot, and she had a special treat with it, she said. It was bananas.

In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.”

Gary D. Schmidt book Okay for Now

Source: Okay for Now

World

“We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Source: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

Love

“When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

Motivation

“Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Source: Main Street

War, Pleasure, Nature

“Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: Jayber Crow

Drawing

“God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Courtship of Miles Standish

Part IV.
The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)

God

“Even the free importation of foreign corn could very little affect the interest of the farmers of Great Britain. Corn is a much more bulky commodity than butcher's-meat. A pound of wheat at a penny is as dear as a pound of butcher's-meat at fourpence. The small quantity of foreign corn imported even in times of the greatest scarcity, may satisfy our farmers that they can have nothing to fear from the freest importation.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter II

Fear, Time

“Verily, the guide and teacher of this path [of rebellion against, a reigning father] is Your Majesty; others are merely following your footsteps. How can the path which Your Majesty chose to follow can be called 'the path of ill-luck'?
My fathered bartered away the garden of Eden for two grains of wheat; I shall be an unworthy son if I do not sell it for a grain of barley!”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Muhammad Akbar to Aurangzeb; see Studies in Aurangzib's reign: Being Studies in Mughal India, first series by Jadunath Sarkar, p. 68, Ayodhya Revisited https://books.google.com/books?id=gKKaDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA581 by Kunal Kishore, p. 581; Mughal Empire in India, 1526-1761: Volume 2 by Shripad Rama Sharma, p. 637 Quotes from late medieval histories

Teachers

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

Truman Capote book In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood (1965)

“I love Mougouch [Gorky's wife]. What about papa Cézanne... I like the wheat fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. And bread above all. My lever is such with the purple... About 194 feet away from our house [In Armenia] on the road to the spring my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit... This garden was identified as the 'Garden of Wish Fulfillment' and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking their soft and dependable breasts in their hands to rub them on the rocks. Above all this stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun the rain the cold and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree..”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

quote in 1942
1942 - 1948
Source: text for MoMA, describing the 'Garden in Sochi' - series, 26 June 1942

Love, Women, Quotes, Spring

“When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed.”

John Scalzi book Zoe's Tale

Source: Zoe's Tale (2008), Chapter 1 (pp. 27-28)

Life, People, Optimism, Thinking

“An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Quoted in The Fine Art of Political Wit by Leon Harris (1964) Quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0231071949 by Robert Andrews (1993) "Newspaper editors are people who separate the wheat from the chaff and then print the chaff." https://books.google.com/books?id=w8_p1eGVj8gC&pg=PA568&lpg=PA568&dq=adlai+chaff#v=onepage&q=adlai%20chaff&f=false (variation) "Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and print the chaff." https://books.google.com/books?id=OTi0DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA701&lpg=PA701&dq=print+the+chaff&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q=%22print%20the%20chaff%22&f=false (variation) "Journalists separate the wheat from the chaff... and then print the chaff." https://books.google.com/books?id=5pXjFMzIUO8C&pg=PA263&lpg=PA263&dq=adlai+chaff&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q=adlai%20chaff&f=false (variation)  This statement has also been attributed https://books.google.com/books?id=d6JZryGvfxYC&pg=PA210&lpg=PA210&dq=adlai+chaff#v=onepage&q=adlai%20chaff&f=false to an earlier usage by Elbert Hubbard.

“Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

Life, Art, Effort

“The next monument visited was the great Jain temple built only a few years before by Shantidas Jhaveri, one of the wealthiest men of Gujarat in his day and high in favour both with Shah Jahan and after him with Aurangzeb. …In 1638, however, when Mandelslo visited the place, this temple which he calls ‘ the principal mosque of the Banyas ’ was in all its pristine splendour and ‘ without dispute one of the noblest structures that could be seen’. ‘It was then new,’ he adds, ‘ for the Founder, who was a rich Banya merchant, named Shantidas, was living in my time.
As Mandelslo’s description is the earliest account we have of this famous monument, which was desecrated only seven years after visit by the Orders of Aurangzeb, then viceroy of Gujarat (1645), we shall reproduce it at some length. It stood in the middle of a great court which was enclosed by a high wall of freestone. All about this wall on the inner side was a gallery, similar to the cloisters of the monasteries in Europe, with a large number of cells, in each of which was placed a statue in white or black marble. These figures no doubt represented the Jain Tirthankars, but Mandelslo may be forgiven when he speaks of each of them as ‘ representing a woman naked, sitting, and having her legs lying cross under her, according to the mode of the country. Some of the cells had three statues in them, namely, a large one between two smaller ones.’ At the entrance to the temple stood two elephants of black marble in life- size and on one of them was seated an effigy of the builder. The walls of the temple were adorned with figures of men and animals. At the further end of the building were the shrines consisting of three chapels divided from each other by wooden rails. In these were placed marble statues of the Tirthankars with a lighted lamp before that which stood in the central shrine. One of the priests attending the temple was busy receiving from the votaries flowers which were placed round the images, as also oil for the lamps that hung before the rails, and wheat and salt as a sacrifice. The priest had covered his mouth and nose with a piece of linen cloth so that the impurity of his breath should not profane the images.”

Shantidas Jhaveri (1580–1659) Indian jewellery and bullion trader during Mughal era

Description of the temple built by Shantidas Jhaveri. Mandelslo’s Travels In Western India (a.d.1638-9) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.531053 p. 23-25

Life, Men, Flowers, Lying

“Yet if heretics be altogether uprooted by death, this is not contrary to Our Lord's command [in Matthew 13:30], which is to be understood as referring to the case when the cockle [weeds] cannot be plucked up without plucking up the wheat, as we explained above (10, 8, ad 1), when treating of unbelievers in general.”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

II–II, q. 11, art. 3, ad. 3
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Death

“5967. You must not hope to reap Wheat, where you sow'd none.”

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

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

Hope

“Harriet: [making an excuse] Um… I'm looking for a copy of The Wheat-Free Guide to Creative Visualization in Co-dependent Past-Life Relationships.
Mo: Huh. Jeez, I never heard of that one… Wonder if it's in spirituality or cooking.”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#21, "By the Book" (1987), collected in More DTWOF (1988).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Life, Past, Dependency, Cooking

“Comrade Khrushchev often repeats that Socialism cannot be built with American wheat. I think it can be done by anyone who knows how to do it, while a person who doesn't know how to do it cannot build Socialism even with his own wheat. Khrushchev says we live on charity received from the imperialist countries … What moral right have those who attack us to rebuke us about American aid or credits when Khruschev himself has just tried to conclude an economic agreement with America?”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Jasper Ridley, Tito: A Biography (Constable and Company Ltd., 1994), p. 348-349.
Other

Thinking, Personality, Country

“The Lord said "Let there be wheat" and Saskatchewan was born.”

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) writer and economist

My Discovery of America (1937)

“[Flying into Baltimore after 9/11] I didn't want to see some pacifist, vegan, whole-wheat, free-range, organic, progressive, gray-ponytail, communist, liberal, draft-dodging, NPR-listening wimp! What are they going to do if somebody tries to hijack the plane? Throw a Birkenstock at him? Offer him some pot?…I was hoping for about twenty-five NRA-loving, gun-nut, serial-killing, psychopathic, Ollie North, Norman Schwarzkopf, right-wing, Agent Orange, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, CIA, FBI, automatic-weapon, smart-bomb, laser-sighting bastards!”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Ten Little Indians (2003)

Love, Hope, Flying

“The wheat bought by a farmer to sow is comparatively a fixed capital to the wheat purchased by a baker to make into loaves.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter I, Section IV, On Value, p. 19

“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)

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

Arthur Young (1741–1820) English writer

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

Spring, Time

“As I was painting today, some thoughts came to me and I want to write them down for people I love. I know that I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration. My powers of perception are becoming finer.... with almost every breeze I take, I get a new sense and understanding of the linden tree, of ripened wheat, of hay... I suck everything up into me. And if only now love would blossom for me, before I depart; and if I can paint three good pictures, then I shall go gladly, with flowers in my hair..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal (1897); as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 196
1897

Love, Life, People, Sadness

“The man who desires to have a clear head, a brain keenly alive to the subtle influences of the universe about him, alert to respond to every call made upon it by the bodily organs under its supervision, ready to receive impressions from the infinite source of universal thought, and capable of thinking the high thoughts of God after him, must live simply, abstemiously, naturally, and must avoid every harmful and inferior food. He will select the choicest food stuffs. These will consist of fruits, nuts, legumes, and dextrinized grains,—that is, well-toasted grain preparations, toasted bread, toasted wheat flakes, etc. He will eat sparingly, never to repletion. He will exercise out of doors at least two or three hours daily, living as much of the time as possible in the open air. He will sleep eight hours at night. He will take a vigorous cold bath every morning on rising, and, at least two or three times a week, will take a warm cleansing bath just before going to bed at night. He will conserve for useful work every energy of mind and body. He will endeavor to live righteously in the largest sense of the word.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, pp. 422-423

God, Food, Exercises, Nature

“If the only available genes produce rather large changes, disadvantageous one at a time, then it seems to me probable that evolution will not occur in a random mating population. In a self-fertilised or highly inbred species it may do so if several mutations useful in conjunction, but separately harmful, occur simultaneously. Such an event is rare, but must happen reasonably often in wheat…”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, p. 104.

Change, Time

“Dicaeopolis: Well, how are things at Megara?
Megarian: We are crying with hunger at our firesides.
Dicaeopolis: The fireside is jolly enough with a piper. But what else is doing at Megara, eh?
Megarian: What else? When I left for the market, the authorities were taking steps to let us die in the quickest manner.
Dicaeopolis: That is the best way to get you out of all your troubles.
Megarian: True.
Dicaeopolis: What other news of Megara? What is wheat selling at?
Megarian: With us it is valued as highly as the very gods in heaven!”

Aristophanés The Acharnians

tr. Athen. 1912, vol. 1, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Ach.+751 Acharnians, line 751-759 Acharnians (425 BC)

Hunger, God, Way, Cry

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

William Alcott (1798–1859) American physician and author

Source: Vegetable Diet (1838), p. 252

Life, Time, Animals

“Again, the subject of internal improvements, under the power of Congress to regulate commerce, is put at rest under our system. The power, claimed by construction under the old constitution, was at least a doubtful one; it rested solely upon construction. We of the South, generally apart from considerations of constitutional principles, opposed its exercise upon grounds of its inexpediency and injustice. Notwithstanding this opposition, millions of money, from the common treasury had been drawn for such purposes. Our opposition sprang from no hostility to commerce, or to all necessary aids for facilitating it. With us it was simply a question upon whom the burden should fall. In Georgia, for instance, we have done as much for the cause of internal improvements as any other portion of the country, according to population and means. We have stretched out lines of railroads from the seaboard to the mountains; dug down the hills, and filled up the valleys at a cost of not less than $25,000,000. All this was done to open an outlet for our products of the interior, and those to the west of us, to reach the marts of the world. No State was in greater need of such facilities than Georgia, but we did not ask that these works should be made by appropriations out of the common treasury. The cost of the grading, the superstructure, and the equipment of our roads was borne by those who had entered into the enterprise. Nay, more not only the cost of the iron no small item in the aggregate cost was borne in the same way, but we were compelled to pay into the common treasury several millions of dollars for the privilege of importing the iron, after the price was paid for it abroad. What justice was there in taking this money, which our people paid into the common treasury on the importation of our iron, and applying it to the improvement of rivers and harbors elsewhere? The true principle is to subject the commerce of every locality, to whatever burdens may be necessary to facilitate it. If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah river has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden. So with the mouths of the Alabama and Mississippi river. Just as the products of the interior, our cotton, wheat, corn, and other articles, have to bear the necessary rates of freight over our railroads to reach the seas. This is again the broad principle of perfect equality and justice, and it is especially set forth and established in our new constitution.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Money, Hostility, People, World

“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

“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascod, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

"Geological Reform", Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 25 (1869); as reprinted in Huxley, Discourses, Biological and Geological essays (1909), pp. 335–336
1860s

World, Mathematics, Dependency

“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

Third Century, sect. 3.
Centuries of Meditations

“Your joy is only moment’s exhalation,
at most a blink of eye is your dejection.
As sweetly falls your silent sleep’s protection
you sink in soft earth’s breast, like wheat’s oblation.

Thus Beauty, whose completed germination
was hindered by unfinished life’s perfection,
will in your dying see a resurrection –
a thousand-fold its great reanimation.

For when you’re in your grave you’re handed over
to probing roots of lilac and of lime tree,
to buds the sap is drawn above the clover

aflame to burst in summer’s honeyed finery
of blossomed trees, and so your radiant dreaming
will sweet fulfilment find in springtime’s teeming.”

Kaarlo Sarkia (1902–1945) Finnish poet

Life, Beauty, Dreams, Sleep

“The fact is that the abolition of the corn laws which allowed the importation of wheat from every part of the world whence it can be grown cheaper and sent here and the unhappy pressure of the last few years' bad harvests have broken down the landed system of England and no power on earth can set it up again. (Hear, hear). What I want with regard to the land system is not many or any new fangled propositions. What I want is that we should at first remove all the obstructions which the present law puts in the way of the easy transfer and the division of land.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Somerset (12 October 1885), quoted in The Times (13 October 1885), p. 7. "New fangled propositions" was a reference to Joseph Chamberlain's "unauthorised programme".
1880s

World, Law, Way, Parting

“Pleasant, berries in the time of harvest;
Also pleasant, wheat upon the stalk.
Pleasant the sun moving in the firmament;
Also pleasant the retaliators of outcries.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Pleasant Things of Taliesin

Time, Sun

“Do these things for the sake of your country during the war. Do them for the sake of your country after the war. When the smoke of this great conflict has been dissolved in the atmosphere we breathe there will reappear a new Britain. It will be the old country still, but it will be a new country. Its commerce will be new, its trade will be new, its industries will be new. There will be new conditions of life and of toil, for capital and for labour alike, and there will be new relations between both of them and for ever. (Cheers.) But there will be new ideas, there will be a new outlook, there will be a new character in the land. The men and women of this country will be burnt into fine building material for the new Britain in the fiery kilns of the war. It will not merely be the millions of men who, please God! will come back from the battlefield to enjoy the victory which they have won by their bravery—a finer foundation I would not want for the new country, but it will not be merely that—the Britain that is to be will depend also upon what will be done now by the many more millions who remain at home. There are rare epochs in the history of the world when in a few raging years the character, the destiny, of the whole race is determined for unknown ages. This is one. The winter wheat is being sown. It is better, it is surer, it is more bountiful in its harvest than when it is sown in the soft spring time. There are many storms to pass through, there are many frosts to endure, before the land brings forth its green promise. But let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.”

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

Loud cheers.
Speech in his constituency of Carnavon Boroughs (3 February 1917), quoted in The Times (5 February 1917), p. 12
Prime Minister

Life, Women, Men, God

“As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

Report From Part One (1972)

“By this I refer to the fact that at the same time several people may each possess some portion of the rights to use the land. A may possess the right to grow wheat on it. B may possess the right to walk across it. C may possess the right to dump ashes and smoke on it. D may possess the right to fly an airplane over it. E may have the right to subject it to vibrations consequent to the use of some neighboring equipment. And each of these rights may be transferable. In sum, private property rights to various partitioned uses of land are "owned" by different persons.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Source: Economic Forces at Work, 1977, p. 132-133

People, Time, Personality, Flying

“Humans brain function and it s learning capacity can reform from the simplest abacus and calculators to super and gigantic computers. Based on such example, the brains functionality and ability of most humans has stalled at the level of abacus. This condition has made the brain to stay in that level like a rusted metal. Start improving your brain ability based on what I have taught you about “Thinking”, then the rustiness of your brain will begin to reduce and your brain functionality will increase so it can reach higher levels. You can plough your land, plant wheat and wait for months, then you take care of it and harvest your land and then using mill to produce flour and by that you make bread. With so much effort you can end up in making bread but with so much easier paths without spending energy, you can get the bread or any other food. Unfortunately most of humans are like those who spend their life time to make bread in worst ways possible, the longest and hardest. Don’t be one of them, and if you are try to leave them. Use the best and easiest methods for solving your issues.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

The Great Master of Thought (Amen- Vol.3), Observing management

Life, Food, Way, Thinking

“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)

“… how can I permit my disciples, Mahāmati, to eat food consisting of flesh and blood, which is gratifying to the unwise but is abhorred by the wise, which brings many evils and keeps away many merits; and which was not offered to the Rishis and is altogether unsuitable?
Now, Mahāmati, the food I have permitted [my disciples to take] is gratifying to all wise people but is avoided by the unwise; it is productive of many merits, it keeps away many evils; and it has been prescribed by the ancient Rishis. It comprises rice, barley, wheat, kidney beans, beans, lentils, etc., clarified butter, oil, honey, molasses, treacle, sugar cane, coarse sugar, etc.; food prepared with these is proper food. Mahāmati, there may be some irrational people in the future who will discriminate and establish new rules of moral discipline, and who, under the influence of the habit-energy belonging to the carnivorous races, will greedily desire the taste [of meat]: it is not for these people that the above food is prescribed. Mahāmati, this is the food I urge for the Bodhisattva-Mahāsattvas who have made offerings to the previous Buddhas, who have planted roots of goodness, who are possessed of faith, devoid of discrimination, who are all men and women belonging to the Śākya family, who are sons and daughters of good family, who have no attachment to body, life, and property, who do not covet delicacies, are not at all greedy, who being compassionate desire to embrace all living beings as their own person, and who regard all beings with affection as if they were an only child.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Mahayana, Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, Chapter Eight. On Meat-eating

Life, Women, Men, People

“Do you believe that a dead woman can conceive from a live man and bring forth a live child? Do you believe it, any of you mothers? Do you believe it, any of you fathers? No, you know better. Well, if a woman will not produce when she is dead, then the earth cannot produce living things if it was dead. Does the earth conceive? It does, and it brings forth. If it did not, why do you go and put your wheat into the ground? Does it not conceive it? But it does not conceive except you put it there. It conceives and brings forth, and you and I live, both for food and for clothing, silks and satins. What! satin grow? Yes. What produces it? The silkworm produces it. Does the silkworm produce except it conceives? No, it eats of the mulberry tree. Where does the mulberry tree come from? It comes from the earth. Where did the earth come from? From its parent earths. Well, some of you may call that foolish philosophy. But if it is, I will throw out foolish things, that you may gather up wise things. The earth is alive. If it was not, it could not produce: If you find a piece of earth that is dead, you cannot produce anything from it, except you resurrect it and restore it to life.”

Heber C. Kimball (1801–1868) American Mormon leader

Journal of Discourses 6:35-36 (Nov. 8, 1857)

Life, Food, Parent, Tree

“Judaism was a divinely appointed type of the Millennial Kingdom of Christ which will control and regulate all matters; hence Judaism was properly a union of church and state - of religious and civil government. But, as we have already shown, the Gospel Church was in no sense to be associated in, or to have anything to do with, the government of the world, until her Lord, the King of Kings, comes, assumes control, and exalts her as his bride to share in that reign of righteousness. Neglecting the Lord's words, and following human wisdom, theories and plans, the great system called Christendom, embracing all governments and creeds professing to be Christ's (but a miserable counterfeit of the true Kingdom of Christ), was organized before the time, without the Lord, and of wholly unfit elements. The fall of Babylon as an unfit church-state system, and the gathering out of the worthy wheat, therefore, can be and is well illustrated by the fall of Judaism.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 153.

Wisdom, World, Sense, Time

“Wisdom, Power and Goodness meet
In the bounteous field of wheat.”

Hannah Flagg Gould (1788–1865) American writer

"The Wheatfield"

Wisdom

“Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part II, Chapter V, Reservoir System and Commodities, p. 72
Storage and Stability (1937)

Suffering

“There is no city, country-side, or castle, nor any place in all Romagna, nor officer or minister of the duke's, who does not know of these abuses; and, amongst others, the famine of wheat occasioned by the traffic which he held against our express prohibition, sending out such quantities as would abundantly have sufficed for the people and the army.”

Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) Duke of Romagna and former Catholic cardinal

Cesare's publication on the corrupt practices of Ramiro de Lorqua (December, 1502) as quoted by Rafael Sabatini, 'The Life of Cesare Borgia', Chapter XVI: Ramiro De Lorqua

People, Country

“Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other.”

Mordecai Richler (1931–2001) Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist

Reported in Mark Steyn, "Mordecai Richler, 1931-2001", New Criterion (September 2001), Vol. 20, Issue 1, pp. 123–128.
Other

People, Country

“I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Preface
Periodic Kingdom (1995)

Lie, World, Travel, History

“There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world. There is not an act of kindness or generosity, not an act of sacrifice done, or a word of peace and gentleness spoken, not a child's prayer uttered, that does not sing hymns to God before his throne, and in the eyes of men, and before their faces.”

Thomas Merton book The Seven Storey Mountain

The Seven Storey Mountain (1948)

Men, God, World, Peace

“Now I saw braves hang themselves with amulets, leave tidbits for spirits, and still take an arrow in the neck. I, worshiping nothing and bribing nothing with prayers, rode among an enemy unscathed, scything them like summer wheat.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book One, Part I “The Krarl”, Chapter 4 (p. 31)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Summer

“By Jesus’s time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmers, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: “It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns,” this is taken to mean: “It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill.””

Robert Graves book King Jesus

Source: King Jesus (1946), Ch. 21.

Women, World, Family, Law

“People sometimes forget that there are vegetables and vegetables. There are vegetables that have not so much nutriment in them; but there are others – all the farinaceous foods such as wheat and barley – which contain a greater amount of nutriment than beef or any other animal meat.”

Francis William Newman

Essays on Diet (1883); quoted in Prof. Francis William Newman http://www.ivu.org/history/europe19b/newman.html at the International Vegetarian Union website.

People, Food, Animals, Forgetting

“Today, the Italians have (hard) wheat foods like spaghetti and macaroni as their staple, while most Europeans use the potato. The Italians took the idea of the spaghetti-type foods from the Chinese noodle after Marco Polo returned from travels there, while Europe adopted the potato from American Indians. In neither case were Europeans enslaved before they could receive a benefit that was the logical heritage of all mankind, but Africans are to be told that the European slave trade developed us by bringing us maize and cassava.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 156.

Food, Travel, Idea

“American wheat, sold in Europe at lower prices than the domestic product, brought on a crisis in European peasant agriculture, sending a migrant stream of ruined peasants to seek new sources of livelihood in the burgeoning Americas. Ironically many of them made the journey westward on the same ships that carried to Europe the wheat that proved their undoing.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 319.

“But I do like this language -- wheat and chaff -- with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say “comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it.”

Grace Paley (1922–2007) American writer and activist

"The Story Hearer"

Pleasure, Thinking

“[Nasreddin Hoca is being shaved by an inexperienced barber. ]
"One moment, Sir!" said the barber, and he stuck a bit of cotton on the wound. In the next pass of the razor, another bit of the Hoca's cheek went with it. "One moment, sir!" and he stuck a bit of cotton on the second wound. With each stroke of the razor, another bit of cotton joined the crop sprouting on the Hoca's left cheek. "Now," said the barber, "I'll do the other side." "One moment, young man!" said the Hoca as he studied the bits of cotton that dotted his left cheek. "Stop right there! I believe I'll plant wheat on the other side."”

Nasreddin (1208–1284) philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes

Barbara K. Walker and Helen Siegl, The Art of the Turkish Tale (1990), Vol. 1, , p. 57

Study

“I will not bring dishonor on my sacred arms nor will I abandon my comrade wherever I shall be stationed. I will defend the rights of gods and men and will not leave my country smaller, when I die, but greater and better, so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all. I will respect the rulers of the time duly and the existing ordinances duly and all others which may be established in the future. And if anyone seeks to destroy the ordinances I will oppose him so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all. I will honor the cults of my fathers. Witnesses to this shall be the gods Agraulus, Hestia, Enyo, Enyalius, Ares, Athena the Warrior, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone, Heracles, and the boundaries of my native land, wheat, barley, vines, olive-trees, fig-trees…”

Lycurgus (-390–-324 BC) Ancient Greek politician and orator

(The oath of the ephebi, [young men] of Athens at the age of eighteen). Speeches, Against Leocrates, 1, 77.

Men, God, Tree, Time

“Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders.”

Carl Sandburg Chicago

"Chicago" (1916)

World

“With regard to certain other fallacies with which the farmers have been beset, and latterly more so than ever; the farmer has been told that if there was a free trade in corn, wheat would be so cheap, that he would not be able to carry on his farm. He is directed only to look at Dantzic, where corn, he is told, was once selling at 15s. 11d. per quarter, and on this the Essex Protection Society put out their circulars, stating that Dantzic wheat is but 15s. 11d. per quarter, and how would the British farmer contend against this? …As far as I can obtain information from the books of merchants, the cost of transit from Dantzic, during an average of ten years, may be put down at 10s. 6d. a quarter, including in this, freight, landing, loading, insurance, and other items of every kind. This is the natural protection enjoyed by the farmers of this country.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1844/mar/12/protective-duties-the-agricultural in the House of Commons (12 March 1844). 1840s

Books, Nature, Country

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World, Way, Mountain, Boy

“I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water.... I like the wheat-fields the plough the apricots those flirts of the sun. But bread above all.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942
Source: posthumous, Movements in art since 1945, p. 31: (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 28)

Water, Sun, Personality

“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

“A decrease in the world supply of wheat has resulted in a very large increase in the price of that commodity. The position of all agricultural products indicates a better balanced supply, but we can not yet conclude that agriculture is recovered from the effects of the war period or that it is permanently on a prosperous basis. The cattle industry has not yet recovered and in some sections has been suffering from dry weather. Every effort must be made both by Government activity and by private agencies to restore and maintain agriculture to a complete normal relationship with other industries.”

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

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

War, World, Effort, Suffering

“The Bible says God gave herb for the service of man and bread to strengthen man's heart. Did you know bread used to strengthen your heart? But keep in mind, you know, "the love of money, the root of all evil." They learned years ago, if they take out the vitamin E, the lecithin, and the omega-3 fatty acids (they take them out of the wheat; and make the bread with white flour), the bread lasts for months. But the people started dying of heart attacks and strokes and circulation problems. See, it's a simple formula: the whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. Now it's not the white bread that's killing you. It's what's not in the bread that's killing you. See, God made bread to strengthen your heart. Remember the Bible talked about "our daily bread." But people who are making bread to sell, got tired of having half of it go bad on the shelf where they couldn't sell it. So they had to figure out a way to make their bread last longer to increase profits.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Love, Money, God, People

“Woman, a thing changeable in nature,
more than whistles in the wind and more than the tip
of a supple stalk of wheat.”

Torquato Tasso Aminta

Femina, cosa mobil per natura,
Più che fraschetta al vento, e più che cima
Di pieghevole spica.
Act I, scene ii. Compare: "Varium et mutabile semper femina", Virgil, Aeneid, 4.569.
Aminta (1573)

Nature

“The king's majesty desires nothing more than concord…; he knows there are those who would stir up strife, and that in many places in his field tares have sprongen to harm the wheat. The forwardness and carnal lust of some, the inveterate corruption and superstitious tenacity of opinion of others, excite disputation and quarrels most horrible to good Christian men; one side calls the other papists, and the other again calls them heretics, both naughty and not to be borne; and that the less so because they miserably abuse the Holy Word of God and the Scriptures which the same most noble prince of his gentleness and for the salvation and consolation of his people has permitted them to read in the vulgar tongue. They twist God's sacred gift, now into heresy and now into superstition. [The king] favours nor one side nor the other but, as becometh a Christian prince, profess the true Christian faith [therefore the king desires the] true doctrine and rule of the Gospel shall be published clear and established [and] the pious observation of ceremonies shall be distinguished from the impious, their use taught and their abuse abolished.”

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (1485–1540) English statesman and chief minister to King Henry VIII of England

Speech to the reassmbled Parliament, 12 April 1540. (Journal of the House of Lords: I, pp. 128-9.)

Men, God, People, Faith

“We're all grossly ignorant about most things that we use and encounter in our daily lives, but each of us is knowledgeable about tiny, relatively inconsequential things. For example, a baker might be the best baker in town, but he's grossly ignorant about virtually all the inputs that allow him to be the best baker. What is he likely to know about what goes into the processing of the natural gas that fuels his oven? For that matter, what does he know about oven manufacture? Then, there are all the ingredients he uses -- flour, sugar, yeast, vanilla and milk. Is he likely to know how to grow wheat and sugar and how to protect the crop from diseases and pests? What is he likely to know about vanilla extraction and yeast production? Just as important is the question of how all the people who produce and deliver all these items know what he needs and when he needs them. There are literally millions of people cooperating with one another to ensure that the baker has all the necessary inputs. It's the miracle of the market and prices that gets the job done so efficiently. What's called the market is simply a collection of millions upon millions of independent decision makers not only in America but around the world. Who or what coordinates the activities all of these people? Rest assuredly it's not a bakery czar.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

1970s, Economics for the Citizen (1978)

People, World, Disease, Question

“Within the next ten years Rossum's Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There'll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there'll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves… But before that some awful things may happen, Miss Glory. That just can't be avoided. But then the subjugation of man by man and the slavery of man to matter will cease. Never again will anyone pay for his bread with hatred and his life. There'll be no more laborers, no more secretaries. No one will have to mine coal or slave over someone else's machines. No longer will man need to destroy his soul doing work that he hates.”

Karel Čapek R.U.R.

R.U.R. (1920)

Life, Hate, People, Soul

“[chaff] Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

The Philistine http://books.google.com/books?id=MaVHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22editor+a+person+employed+on+a+newspaper%22+%22whose+business+it+is+to+separate+the+wheat+from+the+chaff+and+to+see+that+the+chaff+is+printed%22&pg=PA810#v=onepage (May 1913) The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days http://books.google.com/books?id=ZQLpQ2SAIeQC&q=%22Editor+1+a+person+employed+on+a+newspaper+whose+business+it+is+to+separate+the+wheat+from+the+chaff+and+to+see+that+the+chaff+is+printed%22&pg=PA46#v=onepage (1914). Famous Lines: A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations https://books.google.com/books?id=MtciwlIG3sMC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=adlai+chaff+elbert#v=onepage&q=adlai%20chaff%20elbert&f=false (1997), see Adlai Stevenson for a later variation

Business, Personality

“So then Mom decided my father ought to do a vegan diet, too. Well, my father grew up on a cattle ranch, but the nice thing is, my dad’s been sitting at the same dinner table for fifty-one years, and he can’t find his way around the kitchen! He’s been relying my Mom for fifty-one years to put the plate in front of him. So Mom went to the local health food store and bought hot dogs that are called “Not Dogs” and veggie burgers – which used to taste like cardboard, but now they’re really good. She can get Canadian bacon made of a wheat derivative. It’s all vegetarian. Instead of cow’s milk, it’s soy milk, rice milk, fake eggs – all that stuff! Dad just keeps cleaning his plate. Now I’ve got two vegetarian parents, and only one of them know it!”

Neal D. Barnard (1953) American physician, author, and clinical researcher

Wramc Us Too, Inc Newsletter (2003).

Health, Food, Dogs, Way

“Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat.”

Frederic Dan Huntington (1819–1904) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 344.

Men, Sleep

“By this time we had reached the trench system. On both sides of us men were going along the trenches with their Tommy guns. A tank assaulted one of the trenches and behind it was a young radio operator calmly chewing a stalk of wheat, waiting to flash the words that the bastion had been taken. Shouts of “come on out of there you Nazi 'so-and-so's'" and "keep your hands up you 'such-and-such'" announced the arrival of the First Troop. Then they began to pop up like prairie dogs.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

Broadcast from Normandy (1944)

Men, Dogs, Time, Waiting

“One day I rode in company with ‘Alã-ul-mulk and arrived at a plain called Tarna at a distance of seven miles from the city. There I saw innumerable stone images and animals, many of which had undergone a change, the original shape being obliterated. Some were reduced to a head, others to a foot and so on. Some of the stones were shaped like grain, wheat, peas, beans and lentils. And there were traces of a house which contained a chamber built of hewn stone, the whole of which looked like one solid mass. Upon it was a statue in the form of a man, the only difference being that its head was long, its mouth was towards a side of its face and its hands at its back like a captive’s. There were pools of water from which an extremely bad smell came. Some of the walls bore Hindî inscriptions. ‘Alã-ul-mulk told me that the historians assume that on this site there was a big city, most of the inhabitants of which were notorious. They were changed into stone. The petrified human form on the platform in the house mentioned above was that of their king. The house still goes by the name of ‘the king’s house’. It is presumed that the Hindî inscriptions, which some of the walls bear, give the history of the destruction of the inhabitants of this city. The destruction took place about a thousand years ago…”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Lahari Bandar (Sindh) . The Rehalã of Ibn Battûta translated into English by Mahdi Hussain, Baroda, 1967, p. 10.
Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

History, Water, Change, Animals

“To produce 1 lb. of feedlot beef requires 7 lbs. of feed grain, which takes 7,000 lbs. of water to grow. Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle. Yet in the U. S., 70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced goes to feeding herds of livestock. Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. … In the U. S., livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do. Just one hog farm in Utah, for example, produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. These megafarms are proliferating, and in populous areas their waste is tainting drinking water. In more pristine regions, from Indonesia to the Amazon, tropical rain forest is being burned down to make room for more and more cattle. … We, at least, have the flexibility—the omnivorous stomach and creative brain—to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions of a diverse plant-based diet, as millions of people already have.”

Ed Ayres (1941) American magazine editor

"Will We Still Eat Meat?", in Time magazine (8 November 1999), pp. 1 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992523-1,00.html- 2 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,992523-2,00.html.

People, World, Food, Angels

“That summer I was nominated to go to the Team Birkie ski camp for the best high school cross-country skiers in the state. … The camp served vegetable lasagna, all kinds of salads, and freshly baked whole wheat bread. … I didn't have any choice, so I ate it all. And I couldn't believe how good it tasted! What was even more amazing was how great I felt. I trained more, and more often, at that camp than I ever had before. And I had never felt better, stronger. I suspected that what I was eating had something to do with how I was feeling, but it wasn't until years later, when I began to study the connection between diet and exercise, nutrition and health, that I learned the importance of diet for everyone — not just athletes. I would learn that a plant-based diet meant more fiber, which sped food through the digestive tract, minimizing the impact of toxins. The same diet also meant more vitamins and minerals; more substances like lycopene, lutein, and beta carotene, which helps protect against chronic disease. And it would mean less refined carbohydrates and trans fats, both implicated in heart disease and other ailments.”

Scott Jurek (1973) American ultramarthon runner

Source: Eat and Run (2012), Ch. 4, pp. 31-32

Health, Disease, School, Food

“She does not know how little anyone cares to separate wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field.”

Paolo Bacigalupi book The Windup Girl

Source: The Windup Girl (2009), p. 204

“In the interior of the atom, Bohr had tried the plan of retaining the particle-electron and modifying the classical mechanics. Heisenberg took the opposite course, his procedure amounting in effect to retaining the classical mechanics, at least in form, and modifying the electron. Actually, the electron dropped out all together, because it exists only as a matter of inference and not of direct observation. For the same reason, the new theory contains no mention of atoms, nuclei, protons, or of electricity in any shape or form. The existences of all these are matters of inference, and Heisenberg's purely mathematical theory could no more make contact with them than with the efficiency of a turbine or with the price of wheat.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Mathematics

“Solitude is greater than I anticipated. My sense of values is changing, and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. I am better able to tell what in the world is wheat for me and what is chaff. In fact, my definition of success itself is changing.”

Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888–1957) Medal of Honor recipient and United States Navy officer

Source: Alone (1938), Ch. 6

World, Sense, Solitude, Change

“Satin rays and coloured days
Stark blue horizons
Naked limbs and wheat bins, hazy afternoons
Voicing, rejoicing the wine cups do bring
Pussywillows, cat-tails, soft winds and roses”

Gordon Lightfoot (1938) Canadian singer-songwriter

Pussywillows, Cat-Tails, Track 8, UNITED ARTISTS
Did She Mention My Name? (1968)

Cats, Wine

“The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Appreciating Imagination http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=241 (1997) Context: It's pretty simple, the ethical life - it's just demanding... The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is - unless you're at Esalen - you should clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple others - obvious - things to be done. It's not about how many prostrations you do, or what lineage you've associated yourself with, or how much cholesterol is in your diet. And somehow we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices - probably because we have been too infected by the memes of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity - because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming - that's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy - the quietude of Asian religion, I think.

Life, Grass

“We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
Context: We are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat, — the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest, — has silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it be genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to. Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came into the world?

Imagination, Nature

“But we won't have any genetically modified food, oooh no, we won't have any GM. Which is a shame, I think we've missed a trick there. We could develop wheat with the properties of Velcro… to catch whatever it is that's forming those crop circles! But then the spaceship would have to have the corresponding Velcro, so it's a bit of a long shot.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Part Troll (2004)

Food, Thinking

“The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

"On Freedom" in All Life is Problem Solving (1999)
Context: When I speak of reason or rationalism, all I mean is the conviction that we can learn through criticism of our mistakes and errors, especially through criticism by others, and eventually also through self-criticism. A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others — not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others. The emphasis here is on the idea of criticism or, to be more precise, critical discussion. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it.

Truth, Idea, Thinking, Help

“What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 224
Context: What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war; petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict. Thus when war is waged it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it. It amounts to this, that a self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war. But why is it so essential to be able to make war? No one knows, any more than the Trojans knew why it was necessary for them to keep Helen. That is why the good intentions of peace-loving statesman are so ineffectual. If the countries were divided by a real opposition of interests, it would be possible to arrive at a satisfactory compromise. But when economic and political interests have no meaning apart from war, how can they be peacefully reconciled?

War, Country

“…if wheat were at this moment subject to a duty of twenty shillings the quarter, and if Indian corn were virtually excluded, next winter would not pass without a convulsion endangering the whole frame of society, without the humiliation of constituted authorities forced to yield after a disgraceful struggle…if their [the Protectionists] advice had been taken, we should have had famine prices for many articles, and a state of exasperated public feeling and just agitation, which it would require wiser heads than theirs to allay. So far from regretting the expulsion from office, I rejoice in it as the greatest relief from an intolerable burden. To have your own way, and to be for five years the Minister of this country in the House of Commons, is quite enough for any man's strength. He is entitled to his discharge, from length of service. But to have to incur the deepest responsibility, to bear the heaviest toil, to reconcile colleagues with conflicting opinions to a common course of action, to keep together in harmony the Sovereign, the Lords and the Commons; to have to do these things, and to be at the same time the tool of a party—that is to say, to adopt the opinions of men who have not access to your knowledge, and could not profit by it if they had, who spend their time in eating and drinking, and hunting, shooting, gambling, horse-racing, and so forth—would be an odious servitude, to which I will never submit. I determine to keep aloof from party combinations.”

Robert Peel (1788–1850) British Conservative statesman

Letter to Lord Hardinge (24 September, 1846).
Charles Stuart Parker (ed.), Sir Robert Peel from His Private Papers. Volume III (London: John Murray, 1899), pp. 473-474.

Men, Way, Feeling, Drink

“Give men shorter hours in which to labor, and you give them more time to study and learn why bread is so scarce while wheat is so plenty.”

Terence V. Powderly (1849–1924) American mayor

"The Army of the Discontented," http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=nora;cc=nora;g=moagrp;xc=1;q1=The%20Army%20of%20the%20Discontented;rgn=full%20text;cite1=Powderly;cite1restrict=author;view=image;seq=0381;idno=nora0140-4;node=nora0140-4%3A8 North American Review, vol. 140, whole no. 341 (April 1885), p. 377.

Men, Study, Learning, Time

“Well, it's a long time coming,
And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper
A Child is Born (1942)
Context: Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls,
Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars —
They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble,
Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesy
That something new is coming to the world,
The Lord knows what! Well, it's a long time coming,
And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.

Time

“The fruit of success in all these tasks would present the world with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need. The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)
Context: The details of such disarmament programs are manifestly critical and complex. Neither the United States nor any other nation can properly claim to possess a perfect, immutable formula. But the formula matters less than the faith -- the good faith without which no formula can work justly and effectively. The fruit of success in all these tasks would present the world with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need. The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are the needs that challenge this world in arms.

War, World, Peace, Imagination

“We are the earth his word must sow like wheat
And, if it finds no earth, it cannot grow.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Innkeeper's wife
A Child is Born (1942)
Context: We are the earth his word must sow like wheat
And, if it finds no earth, it cannot grow.
We are his earth, the mortal and the dying,
Led by no star — the sullen and the slut,
The thief, the selfish man, the barren woman,
Who have betrayed him once and will betray him,
Forget his words, be great a moment's space
Under the strokes of chance,
And then sink back into our small affairs.
And yet, unless we go, his message fails.

“I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves?”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

On Subsistence, (2 December 1792)

People, Understanding, Freedom

“Milk, barley, wheat, cereals, butter, cheese, tomatoes, honey, dates, fruits, almonds, and sugar-candy are all Sattvic food-stuffs. They render the mind pure and calm and play a very important part in the practices of spiritual aspirants, in the mental development of the student, and in the personality- power of the leaders of mankind.”

Swami Sivananda (1887–1963) Indian philosopher

Personality, Parting, Food