#peasants

I am the son of poor peasants who came at a very young age to live in Algeria. I only recently saw the place where they were born, near the city of Marrakech. ↗

— Ahmed Ben Bella

#algeria #am #born #came #city

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#equipped #everything #going #how #just

And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play. ↗

— Émile Zola

#peasants #terre #vice #love

The revolution in Russia was terrible for the proletariat in the long years of its development and it is terrible now, after the victory. But at the actual time of revolution it was easy, and this was due to the peasants. ↗

— Herman Gorter

#after #development #due #easy #long

Give the peasants neither life nor death. ↗

— Ieyasu Tokugawa

#give #life #neither #nor #peasants

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#because #been #company #educated #i

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt. ↗

— G. M. Trevelyan

#burnt #capable #cricket #french #had

There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them. ↗

— Eugene Chadbourne

#bridges #building #died #folk #folk songs

Your Majesty, I took the liberty because I was so desirous of visiting alone with you for a few minutes before the rest of the other peasants arrived. ↗

— Walter Annenberg

#arrived #because #before #desirous #few

The master and mistress of the house and the rest of the Blood -even the Crux himself- brought our food, poured the wine, did our bidding. The centerpiece was a roasted stag. crowned with gilded antlers and stuffed with songbirds; they had hunted well. We were forbidden to kill the deer that fattened on our coleworts and stole our grain, and the venison tasted all the better for the salt of revenge. ↗

— Sarah Micklem

#feast #peasants #revenge #venison #food