Landless Quotes

The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

a small number of wealthy landowners has dominated a large population of landless and small-holding peasants. ~ BOB

The first thing I did with the prize money was to buy a paddy field for Apa. He would no longer be a landless farmer in an agricultural society. ~ M.C. Mary Kom

The issue of false consciousness is a genuinely difficult problem that has no definite solution. We should not approve of an unequal and brutal society because surveys show that people are happy. But who has the right to tell those oppressed women or starving landless peasants that they shouldn't be happy, if they think they are? Does anyone have the right to make those people feel miserable by telling them the 'truth'? There are no easy answers to these questions, but they definitely tell us that we cannot rely on 'subjective' happiness surveys to decide how well people are doing. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state. ~ Jill Lepore

But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor - landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before - that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else's dream. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Land ownership in Guatemala is more unequal than anywhere else in Latin America. Roughly 90 percent of Guatemalan farms are too small to support a family. A tiny group of Guatemalans owns a third of the country's arable land; more than 300,000 landless peasants must scrounge a living as best they can. ~ Stephen Kinzer

The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. ~ Herman Melville

I don't know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability. ~ Ellen Goodman

The first time I saw your father, I'd just come home from the hunt. The forests of Calydon are thick with game, but the deer are so clever that it was the first time I'd managed to bring one down. I was so proud of what I'd done that I insisted on carrying the buck into the throne room myself and dropped it at my father's feet before I noticed we had a guest." She smiled at the memory.
"I'll bet Father thought you were Artemis herself," I said.
That made my mother laugh. "Not Artemis. You know how he feels about her. But he did say he mistook me for one of her huntress nymphs. That was just before he told me he had to marry me or die."
I made a face. "Father said that?"
"Men say many things when they want to win a woman. Whether or not they mean what they say…" She shrugged. "Your father meant it. Poor soul, it seemed like he would die, because none of my father's advisers thought I should marry him. Tyndareus came to Calydon as a landless exile; his brother had stolen his kingdom."
The story of Father's early trouble and final triumph was so well known that the palace stones could tell it. "Did you come to Sparta to marry him after he won back his crown?" I asked. "Or did he have to go back to Calydon for you?"
"Are you asking because you want to know, or because you want to distract me from what we need to talk about? ~ Esther M. Friesner

Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness - myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me. ~ Luisa A. Igloria