Agrarian Quotes

“Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“One thing work gives
is the joy of not working,
a minute here or there
when I stand and only breathe,
receiving the good of the air.
It comes back. Good work done
comes back into the mind,
a free breath drawn.”
― Wendell Berry

“Buku membuat pemikiran dan pengetahuan kita memiliki nyawa dan kakinya sendiri, melebihi penulisnya.”
― Noer Fauzi Rachman

“Petani Badega: Mengapa para petani di desa-desa dirampas tanahnya dan tidak dilindungi oleh pemerintah? Sebaliknya, petani yang mengambil kembali tanah kepunyaannya justru dipenjarakan?”
― Noer Fauzi Rachman, Bersaksi Untuk Pembaruan Agraria: dari Tuntutan Lokal Hingga Kecenderungan Global

“Siapa yang menguasai tanah, maka dia akan menguasai ekonomi. Siapa yang menguasai ekonomi, maka dia akan menguasai politik. Siapa yang menguasai politik, maka dia akan menguasai negara.”
― Hedar Laudjeng, Dunia Orang Tompu

“Setiap buku memiliki nyawa dan kakinya masing-masing. Penulisnya tidak akan mampu menduga semua yang akan dihampiri atau yang menghampiri buku itu. Yang pasti: Buku yang baik hidup melebihi umur penulisnya.”
― Noer Fauzi Rachman

“Buku ini sesungguhnya upaya semua pihak bahwa untuk negara berkembang yang agraris makna kemerdekaan buat rakyat adalah hak atas tanah yang digarapnya.”
― Gunawan Wiradi, Reforma Agraria: Perjalanan yang belum berakhir

“Conflict is not natural. It’s the result of the false agro-industrial system we’re addicted to.”
― Eleanor Davis, How to Be Happy

“Scotland's passage from a mainly pastoral and agrarian society to a commercial and industrial one was brutal, rapid and relentless. In that transition, an entire peasant class, the cottars - perhaps as much as half of the rural population - was lost forever. They and tens of thousands of even poorer people were forced off the land across the Lowlands, Highlands and islands. They ended up in towns, cities and planned villages, they worked in mills, mines, quarries and iron works, or they emigrated to other parts of the world, or became soldiers, sailors, engineers, administrators and merchants in the service of the British Empire or the companies that thrived under its bellicose protection. Many prospered, many did not.”
― James Robertson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland

“He does not forget—it has been a long time since he has been able to forget—that he is making his stand in the middle of a dying town in the midst of a wasting country, from which many have departed and much has been sent away, a land wasting and dying for want of the human names and knowledge that could give it life.”
― Wendell Berry, The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership