Migrant Farm Worker Quotes

The same skills that I used as a welder, as a migrant farm worker, are similar skills that I'm using as a brain surgeon. ~ Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa

Cleaning and painting finished, the next target was the big ware press in the parlour. Out came delicate china which had been in the family for years. My mother's respect for the Stations weighed against her fear of breakage, but the Stations won every time. Once when a precious jug was broken she mourned it for days, telling us all how long it had been in the family. Finally, Dan, our part-time travelling farm worker, said, "Missus, if it was here that long it was time to break it." And that was the end of that. ~ Alice Taylor

After graduation, I wanted to work for 'Sassy', which I loved, but it had folded. So I wound up at 'Seventeen' for three years on staff and two as a contributor, and I wrote these great stories that nobody ever believes 'Seventeen' does. Serious stories for teens about social justice issues - gun control, migrant farm workers. ~ Gayle Forman

Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Every single day we sit down to eat, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and at our table we have food that was planted, picked, or harvested by a farm worker. Why is it that the people who do the most sacred work in our nation are the most oppressed, the most exploited? ~ Dolores Huerta

The road to social justice for the farm worker is the road of unionization. Our cause, our strike against table grapes and our international boycott are all founded upon our deep conviction that the form of collective self-help, which is unionization, holds far more hope for the farm worker than any other single approach, whether public or private. This conviction is what brings spirit, high hope and optimism to everything we do. ~ Cesar Chavez

It is clearly evident that our path travels through a valley of teas well known to all farm workers, because in all valleys the way of the farm worker has bene one of sacrifice for generations. Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. This Pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations. ~ Cesar Chavez

It is actually costlier to hire an immigrant. And yet the farm worker is almost invariably an immigrant. You can't pay an American to pick blueberries. ~ Trey Gowdy

A pedestrian seems in this country to be a sort of beast of passage - stared at, pitied, suspected and shunned by everyone who meets him ... Every passing coachman called out to me: "Do you want to ride on the outside?" If I met only a farm worker on a horse he would say to me companionably "Warm walking sir," and when I passed through a village the old women in their bewilderment would let out a "God Almighty! ~ Karl Philipp Moritz

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on. ~ Eric Schlosser

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. ~ Alex Kotlowitz

My mother was very involved with Cesar Chavez's work on behalf of the migrant farm workers in California. ~ Caitlin Flanagan

We are not social workers. We are contemplatives in the heart of the world. ~ Mother Teresa

The benefits provided by worker participation are twofold. Quality is improved because of the finding and fixing of a very large number of problems, but also, and perhaps equally important, moral is improved. ~ George E.P. Box

The farm is one field to the east of the railroad track that used to connect New Orleans with Chicago. The track runs beside Highway 45, an old U.S. route that unites Chicago with Mobile, Alabama. ~ Bobbie Ann Mason

It almost rained Saturday.The clouds hung low over the farm.The air felt thick.It smelled like rain.
In town,the sidewalks got damp, that was all. ~ Karen Hesse

I have a weakness for Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers and was delighted to find out that 55 goldfish were only 150 calories - not bad! One time, Liz brought something I hadn't tried before: Flavor Blasted Goldfish. We passed around the bag and discussed whether it was better than the original. Some of my staff thought yes, which was incorrect. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act. ~ Max Weber

Lovable work is visible work. The question of who gets a public platform as a worker and who does not is neatly side-stepped by Jobs's narrative. What do those in the invisible workforce call themselves in their social media profiles? What kinds of identities are available to them? These questions are critical because, as Jonathan Crary notes in his recent book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, while the notion of identity is bound up with public visibility, today that public exposure has become detached from communal forms that once provided safekeeping and care. Crary notes that in the always-on, 24/7 temporality in which we now live, the pressure to be constantly consuming or producing necessitates a constant presence in the public sphere, specifically in the marketplace. ~ Miya Tokumitsu

All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don't get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The only ingenuity I can see is Gaddis' wherewithal in getting this brick published, printed, and hyped-up enough to win the National Book Award. Did he use coercion, bribery, blackmail perhaps? Did he have incriminating evidence on certain influential literary critics and talking heads, like pictures of them with farm animals or something? ~ A. Cretan

Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That's when I seen that she has freckles. ~ Wally Lamb

It's commonly said that if slaughterhouses had clear glass walls, nobody would eat meat. I think people go out of their way to remain ignorant about how factory farm animals are treated. ~ Steve-O

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie? ~ Albert Einstein

If you move furniture all day, if you're a construction worker, if you have a job that's real physical, this idea that there is a sport that involves the kind of conventional, traditional view of toughness, you see that still as a positive thing. ~ Chuck Klosterman

For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory. ~ Glenway Wescott

THE LILIES

This morning it was, on the pavement,
When that smell hit me again
And set the houses reeling.
People passed like rain:
(The way rain moves and advances over the hills)
And it was hot, hot and dank,
The smell like animals, strong, but sweet too.
What was it?
Something I had forgotten.
I tried to remember, standing there,
Sniffing the air on the pavement.
Somehow I thought of flowers.
Flowers! That bad smell!
I looked: down lanes, past houses--
There, behind a hoarding,
A rubbish-heap, soft and wet and rotten.

Then I remembered:
After the rain, on the farm,
The vlei that was dry and paler than a stone
Suddenly turned wet and green and warm.
The green was a clash of music.
Dry Africa became a swamp
And swamp-birds with long beaks
Went humming and flashing over the reeds
And cicadas shrilling like a train.

I took off my clothes and waded into the water.
Under my feet first grass, then mud,
Then all squelch and water to my waist.
A faint iridescence of decay,
The heat swimming over the creeks
Where the lilies grew that I wanted:
Great lilies, white, with pink streaks
That stood to their necks in the water.
Armfuls I gathered, working there all day.
With the green scum closing round my waist,
The little frogs about my legs,
And jelly-tr ~ Doris Lessing

He doesn't look like a gangster, but then he's not the office worker type, either ... some kind of entrepreneur maybe, or, - wait, I've got it! He looks like he writes manga! Either that or a chiropractor, I guess. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at a slower, more rational pace than the bustling cities where I'd resided my adult life. ~ David Mixner

One great worker equals three not-so-great workers, so it's worth paying terrific people not just for today but to find people that we think have upward mobility to become tomorrow's leaders. ~ Danny Meyer

By putting "God" and "work" in the same title - in, so to speak, the same breath - Mr. Keeble challenges the modern orthodoxy, which has done its best to keep those terms separate. The great dissociation of which T. S. Eliot and others have spoken has made it likely that people will exclude from their forms of worship any reference to their economic life or the quality of their work, and that they will exclude from their work any sense of religious obligation. By bringing those two words back into their old association, and by the honor he gives to people who conscientiously kept them associated, Mr. Keeble restores to practical viability the idea of good work. He brings again into view the possibility of religion practicable in work, and work compatible with worship and wholly meant. Wendell Berry Lanes Landing Farm Port Royal, Kentucky ~ Brian Keeble

Sitting at the table were three Russian prisoners of war that had been assigned to work on her husband's farm. Hesitantly, we sat down with these men. I couldn't understand a word they said and I couldn't know the awful circumstances under which I would see them again. We stayed at the farm that entire day and she let us sleep in a nice large bed, tucked under the eaves of the attic. It would have been perfect except that we didn't have any pillows or blankets but at least there wasn't a corpse in bed with us! The nights were getting cold this time of year, besides the Russians had made me feel considerably uncomfortable. When I asked her about her neighbors she avoided the question and so I thought it best to continue our search, in hopes of a better place to stay. ~ Hank Bracker

You can't have the family farm without the family. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are a lot of different paths through the jungle, but ... the simplest thing you can do is make yourself useful. Be easy to work with, be a hard worker and help people get the job done. And do it with as much passion and quality as you can. ~ Harrison Ford

These deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who'd never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who did not know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold anything and didn't know how to sell anything, who'd never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker - people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who nonetheless imagined that they knew everything worth knowing. ~ Philip Roth

In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point. ~ Dan Barber

Before I found Minerva, I'd passed nights with more than my share of women."
Thorne groaned. Don't. Just don't.
"I've passed time with duchesses and farm girls, and it doesn't matter whether their skirts are silk or homespun. Once you get them bare
"
Thorne drew up short. "If you start in on rivers of silk and alabaster orbs, I will have to hit you. ~ Tessa Dare

There are distinct health benefits to choosing farm fresh eggs over store bought too. The fresh eggs have as much as a third less of the bad cholesterol than store bought. They are lower in saturated fats and had more vitamin A and E and contained more beta carotene and omega-3 fatty acids. ~ Mel Jeffreys

The library opened in January 1873. Membership was five dollars a year. At the time, five dollars represented several days' pay for an average worker, so only affluent people were able to join. Library rules were schoolmarmish and scoldy. Men were required to remove their hats upon entering the library, and patrons were discouraged from reading too many novels, lest they turn into what the association labeled "fiction fiends." Books considered to be "of dubious moral effect, or trashy, ill-written ones, or flabby ones" were excluded from the collection. Women were not allowed to use the main facilities, but a "Ladies Room" with a selection of magazines was added soon after the library opened. Children were not allowed in the library at all. ~ Susan Orlean

My non American viewers. Who understand that the world does not consist solely of a single nation sailing across an infinite sea of migrant workers. Will no doubt have heard that the waters surrounding Brisbane got tired of waiting for people to hit the beach and decided to bring the party to us. ~ Yahtzee Croshaw

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing. ~ Theodore Bikel

My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Every time that an animal eats a plant or another animal, the conversion of food biomass into the consumer's biomass involves an efficiency of much less than 100 percent: typically around 10 percent. That is, it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. Even among herbivores and omnivores, many species, like koalas, are too finicky in their plant preferences to recommend themselves as farm animals. As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ~ Jared Diamond

Keep off your mind from the reward until the work is done; else you may be directed out of focus by the reward's appeals if it catches your attention! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants? ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

FOR MOST OF human history, education was job training. Hunters, farmers, and warriors taught the young to hunt, farm, and fight. Children of the ruling class received instruction in the arts of war and governance, but this too was intended first and foremost as preparation for the roles they would assume later in society, not for any broader purpose. All that began to change twenty-five hundred years ago in ancient Greece. ~ Fareed Zakaria

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. ~ Jeffrey K. Smith

The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry ... is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse. ~ Martin Gardner