No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence.... As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important ...one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth ... have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being (esse) is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper--just running down the edges of different countries and contin...ents, "looking for something" ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It ...is arduous and it is rare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture ...therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take), teach t...hat nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, "All summer in the field, a...nd all winter in the study." And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As this world is at present constituted, what we call the lower part of mankind work for pay, and by that means support themselves... and families; yet their assistance by the means of their labor is as necessary to the rich as the pay of the rich is to the laboring man. Did not this dependency for common subsistence oblige the lower class of men to sell their labor, if the gentleman whose birth and fortune had enabled him to have had a literate education was to despise his cook for his ignorance, the cook in my opinion would then have a very reasonable pretense for withdrawing his labor and forcing the learned insulter to employ some of that time in preparing food for his body which he (by the help of his cook) hath now leisure to employ in pampering the pride of his heart by first acquiring and then applauding his own acquired learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The present century has not dealt kindly with the farmer. His legends are all but obsolete, and his beliefs have been pared away b...y the professors at colleges of agriculture. Even the farm- bred bards who twang guitars before radio microphones prefer "I'm Headin' for the Last Roundup" to "Turkey in the Straw" or "Father Put the Cows Away."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been em...ployed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements ... might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »