Soil Quotes - Page 35

• We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but thats no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but its to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.

  Tom Robbins

  Dust, Blood, Sea

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Another Roadside Attraction”, p.86, Bantam

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• As bronze may be much beautified by lying in the dark damp soil, so men who fade in dust of warfare fade fairer, and sorrow blooms their soul.

  Wilfred Owen

  Lying, Dark, Men

  Wilfred Owen, Douglas Kerr (1994). “The Poems of Wilfred Owen”, p.73, Wordsworth Editions

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• I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever. Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains.

  Keri Hulme

  Beach, Pain, Islands

  Keri Hulme (2005). “The Bone People: A Novel”, p.336, LSU Press

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• All economic activity is dependent upon that environment and its underlying resource base of forests, water, air, soil, and minerals. When the environment is finally forced to file for bankruptcy because its resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated, and irretrievably compromised, the economy goes into bankruptcy with it.

  Gaylord Nelson

  Air, Water, Forests

  Gaylord Nelson, Susan M. Campbell, Paul A. Wozniak (2002). “Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise”, p.18, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation They always presuppose a soil seeded with preliminary knowledge and well prepared by labour, both conscious and subconscious.

  Henri Poincare

  Math, Discovery, Preparation

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• We're talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe it isn't a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it. My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.

  Sharron Angle

  Believe, Government, Texas

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• No, It's hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it's also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

  Ha Jin

  Opportunity, Growth, Kind

  FaceBook post by Ha Jin from Oct 20, 2012

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• If the soil were as good as the harbours, it would be a blessing.

  Jacques Cartier

  Blessing, Would Be, Harbors

  "Voyages of Jacques".

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• The island Mayo is generally barren, being dry, as I said; and the best of it is but a very indifferent soil.

  William Dampier

  Islands, Dry, Barren

  William Dampier (1703). “A New Voyage Round the World”, p.21

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• Everyone—all of us, every last person on God’s earth—deserves decent shelter. It speaks to the most basic of human needs—our home—the soil from which all of us, every last person, either blossom or wither. We each have need of food, clothing, education, medical care, and companionship; but first, we must have a place to live and grow.

  Millard Fuller

  Home, Needs, Earth

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• Something I owe to the soil that grew-More to the life that fed-But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides of my head. I would go without shirt or shoes, Friends, tobacco, or bread Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Shoes, Two, Brain

  Rudyard Kipling (2016). “Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition): 5 Novels & 350+ Short Stories, Poetry, Historical Military Works and Autobiographical Writings from one of the most popular writers in England, known for The Jungle Book, Kim, The Man Who Would Be King”, p.381, e-artnow (Open Publishing)

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• The clearest evidence that we are living beyond environmental means is the threat of dangerous climate change. The scale of this threat, to human life and to the natural resources and assets on which it depends, for everything from oxygen and clean water to healthy soils and flood defence, means that this simply must be our top priority

  David Miliband

  Mean, Oxygen, Water

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• We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Ocean, Lakes

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

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• In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.

  Wendell Berry

  Kentucky, Order, Ifs And

  "Taking Care of What We’ve Been Given". Interview with Thomas P. Healy, www.counterpunch.org. April 15, 2006.

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• To be angry is very good. It burns out things and leaves nutrients in the soil. You should always be ready to be angry at injustice and cruelty.

  Maya Angelou

  Anger, Injustice, Should

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• In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Jobs, Character, Suspense

  "Jhumpa Lahiri Was Abandoned by Her Editor" by Mark Follman, March 21, 2012.

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• Any human being exists only as a member of the wider community of life, air, water, and soil. We have no existence apart from the living earth. We are Earth. What we do to Earth, we do to our self.

  Michael Dowd

  Air, Self, Water

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• Talk uses up ideas. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.

  Doris Grumbach

  Air, Ideas, Silence

  Doris Grumbach (2014). “Fifty Days of Solitude: A Memoir”, p.49, Open Road Media

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• The American flag has not been planted on foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity's sake.

  William McKinley

  Humanity, Flags, Territory

  William McKinley's remarks on 1900 US campaign poster of McKinley and his choice for second term Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, July 12, 1900.

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• I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Men, House

  Henry David Thoreau, Nancy L. Rosenblum (1996). “Thoreau: Political Writings”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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• Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil-that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake. That tree is mostly made up of one of the gases in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight.

  Thom Hartmann

  Mistake, Believe, Light

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• A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

  Walt Whitman

  Song, Cities, Smell

  Walt Whitman, Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, William White (2008). “Leaves of Grass: Vol. I-III: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856”, p.590, NYU Press

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• Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

  Nelson Mandela

  Beautiful, Country, Rainbow

  Presidential Inaugural Speech, delivered 10 May 1994, Pretoria, South Africa

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• Until you commit your goals to paper, you have intentions that are seeds without soil.

  Brian Tracy

  Goal, Paper, Intention

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• Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Colonialism, Groups, Earth

  Kwame Nkrumah (1965). “Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism”

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