Ratzlaff Farm Quotes

Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. ~ George Orwell

The idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images - of Holland and tulips, of rural America with windmill blades slowly turning, pumping water at the farm well ... But the windmills we are talking about today are not your grandmother's windmills. Each one is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Stature of Liberty, taller than a football field is long. ~ Lamar Alexander

What is the bottom line for the animal/human hierarchy? I think it is at the animate/inanimate line, and Carol Adams and others are close to it: we eat them. This is what humans want from animals and largely why and how they are most harmed. We make them dead so we can live. We make our bodies out of their bodies. Their inanimate becomes our animate. We justify it as necessary, but it is not. We do it because we want to, we enjoy it, and we can. We say they eat each other, too, which they do. But this does not exonerate us; it only makes us animal rather than human, the distinguishing methodology abandoned when its conclusions are inconvenient or unpleasant. The place to look for this bottom line is the farm, the stockyard, the slaughterhouse. I have yet to see one run by a nonhuman animal. ~ Catherine Mackinnon

In America the machine is invading all branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly. ~ Paul Lafargue

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

When I was twenty-one, a friend gave me a book called Diet for a New America by John Robbins, which exposed the brutal practices of American factory farms. That, coupled with a lecture from Leonardo DiCaprio (when he was nineteen and I was twenty-one) about how such animals are kept and processed, made me lose my desire for factory farm pork and beef right there. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow

I am the saint at prayer on the terrace like the peaceful beasts that graze down to the sea of Palestine.
I am the scholar of the dark armchair. Branches and rain hurl themselves at the windows of my library.
I am the pedestrian of the highroad by way of the dwarf woods; the roar of the sluices drowns my steps. I can see for a long time the melancholy wash of the setting sun.
I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty on its way to the high seas, the little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the sky.
The paths are rough. The hillocks are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How far away are the birds and the springs! It can only be the end of the world ahead. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

We have nine hungry Rottweilers on the farm. ~ John Entwistle

Meat production is one of the leading causes of climate change because of the destruction of the rainforest for grazing lands, the massive amounts of methane produced by farm animals and the huge amounts of water, grain and other resources required to feed animals. ~ Jane Velez-Mitchell

I was 46 when 'Cold Mountain' came out. I was settled. We had a nice house in Raleigh and a horse farm. ~ Charles Frazier

However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost the ability to communicate above or below ground-you could say they are deaf and dumb-and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they'll be more talkative in the future. ~ Peter Wohlleben

It's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money. ~ Christina Stead

There's work to do. ~ Alien Ant Farm

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I've got a farm in England where I breed horses. ~ Davy Jones

Every farm with slaves was a slave-breeding farm. Raising slaves was mostly a cottage industry ... ~ Ned Sublette

The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there's always the farm and the cows ... ~ Rawi Hage

Is there anything more beautiful than gold?" - Freya's question.

Plain-thoughted Thor spoke. "A farm at first light
Is more beautiful than gold, or
A ship's sails in the mist.
Many ordinary things are far more beautiful. ~ George Webbe Dasent

I think things like 'farm to table' are misleading. I think sometimes that becomes a pedestal or a soap box to get people into your restaurant but is not ... it's almost empty in a way. I mean, my food comes from a farm, and I serve it on a table. ~ Wylie Dufresne

There's this about a farm: when the market's good there's money, and when it's bad there's food. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Matheus pondered which deity he'd annoyed in a previous life. Maybe if he figured out which sacrifices he'd skipped, he could make amends. Did they sell goats at the farmer's market? Matheus wrinkled his nose. He didn't want to leave the city, not to mention the issue of travelling with a goat. People frowned on sticking farm animals in the trunk. What if he got a rack of lamp and chanted over that? Sheep were kind of like goats. ~ Amy Fecteau

I was camped at the same site as her: Broughton Farm. She came over to my tent and showed me her blisters. She asked me whether I knew the reason why a blister can keep on producing fluid ad infinitum. I said that I had always wondered the same thing about mucus. One of the reasons we are together is because we have similar interests. ~ Joe Dunthorne

It's a character I've created. Actually, that's pretty much the opposite of me, off a farm in the Midwest. ~ Douglas Wilson

Oh, they'll be punished." Amaranthe smiled and pointed at the heretofore silent Sicarius.
"Pa here, he's the farm dis-ci-pli-nar-i-an. He was a soldier and he knows how to lay into a man an' make him wish he'd never thunk of running off. Ain't that right, Pa?" She smiled up at Sicarius.
"Yes," he said flatly. "Ma. ~ Lindsay Buroker

It wasn't as though the farm hadn't seen death before, and the blowflies didn't discriminate. To them there was little difference between a carcass and a corpse. The ~ Jane Harper

He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him. Nature cared nothing for prejudice. Men and women were like the animals on the farm at Helford, she supposed; there was a common law of attraction for all living things, some similarity of skin or touch, and they would go to one another. This was no choice made with the mind. Animals did not reason, neither did the birds in the air. Mary was no hypocrite; she was bred to the soil, and she had lived too long with birds and beasts, had watched them mate. and bear their young, and die. There was precious little romance in nature, and she would not look for it in her own life. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Can you call a farm with a dozen geese a farm? Still, it was a little better for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. There were only two pogroms there. What's two pogroms? ~ Roman Vishniac

I don't think of community as being a romantic notion. I think it's as vital as air and water, and so I think that informs a lot of what I write about. It could be a story about a couple, or a song about the slow death of the family farm or a small town. ~ Greg Brown

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me. ~ Norman MacCaig

Is it just me or does it seem like the gods have a vendetta against us?" Hector
"They want us dead" Aricles
"Ah, good. I'm not the only one who's noticed. And here I thought it was just me." Hector
"It is disconcerting, isn't it? And battle isn't all I thought it'd be." Galen
"Is that remorse I hear?" Aricles
"It's remorse. I keep going back to that day on the farm when they came to recruit us. Do you remember what you said to me while we packed?" Galen
"Not to forget your cloak?" Aricles
"You told me that battle wouldn't be the same as the war games I' played. That the day would come when I'd grow tired of walking through blood-saturated fields." Galen
"And has that day come brother?" Aricles
Galen nodded. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

One of the greatest boons that can ever come to a human being is to be born on a farm and reared in the country. Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred. ~ Orison Swett Marden

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors ... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. ~ Temple Grandin

In the fall term of 1933-34 I was on my family farm in Maine. ~ Stephen Cole Kleene

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

I rode horseback three miles each way to get to high school, and in bad weather it was a problem sometimes to make my eight o'clock class on time. Like others, I often missed school to help on the farm, especially in the fall, until after harvest, and in the spring, during planting season. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. ~ Stella Gibbons

We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance. ~ Calvin Coolidge

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices. ~ Ambrose Bierce

A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought. ~ Joel Salatin

It was precisely the perverse type of academic thinking that caused the mess in the first place. It was as though academics thought the entire world was some kind of ant farm constructed for their pleasure and enjoyment and strained observations. He had no place in an institution that suggested personal loss be re-wrought, re-vised, re-fashioned as intellectual palaver, as a paper. Not even for honors. ~ T. Geronimo Johnson