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Peasant

member of a traditional class of farmers

A peasant is a member of a traditional class of farmers, either laborers or owners of small farms. Its plural form is peasants. Peasants form the main labor force in agriculture and horticulture. It also means a country person, an uncouth, crude or ill-bred person.

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  • A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
 
My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

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I grew up in a family of peasants, and it was there that I saw the way that, for example, our wheat fields suffered as a result of dust storms, water erosion and wind erosion; I saw the effect of that on life- on human life. - Mikhail Gorbachev.
  • There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.
  • I have drawn into myself so much that I literally do not see any other people anymore-- excepting the peasants with whom I have direct contact, since I paint them.
 
As farmers or owners, the poor peasants possess a piece of land. The excellent means of transport enables them often to sell their goods. At the very worst they can mostly provide their own food. - Herman Gorter.
  • As farmers or owners, the poor peasants possess a piece of land. The excellent means of transport enables them often to sell their goods. At the very worst they can mostly provide their own food.
    • Herman Gorter, in "Herman Gorter, Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, 1920"
  • Because in Russia you were able to triumph with the help of a large class of poor peasants, you represent things in such a way, as if we in Western Europe are also going to have that help.
    • Herman Gorter, in “Herman Gorter, Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, 1920”
  • For the Russian masses, the proletarians, knew for certain, and already saw during the war, and in part before their very eyes, that the peasants would soon be on their side.
    • Herman Gorter, in “Herman Gorter, Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, 1920”

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  • The dwarf barefooted, chanting
    Behind the oxen by the lake,
    Stepping lightly and lazily among the thorntrees
    Dusky and dazed with sunlight, half awake;
    The women breaking stones upon the highway,
    Walking erect with burdens on their heads,
    One body growing in another body,
    Creation touching verminous straw beds.
    Across scorched hills and trampled crops
    The soldiers straggle by.
    History staggers in their wake.
    The peasants watch them die.
    • Alun Lewis, "The Peasants" in Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets (1944)

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Patton was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude - Bill Mauldin.
  • We forgave, followed and accepted because we liked the way he looked. And he had a pretty wife. Camelot was fun, even for the peasants, as long as it was televised to their huts.

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Serfs in feudal England.

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Tahitian girls, modern day

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  • Only in America do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedal pushers and mink stoles / and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech / look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.

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The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard. - Michael J. Saylor.
 
Scratch a Russian you'll find a Tatar. Scratch a Russian worker and you'll find a peasant.
  • After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to maintain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home.
  • Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold: before whose image bow the vulgar great, the vainly rich, the miserable proud, the mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, and with blind feelings reverence the power that grinds them to the dust of misery.
  • The Nazis and Soviets both had a powerful story about who was to blame for the Great Depression (Jewish capitalists or just capitalists) and authentically radical approaches to political economy. The Nazis and Soviets not only rejected the legal and political form of the postwar order but also questioned its economic and social basis. They reached back to the economic and social roots of postwar Europe, and reconsidered the lives and roles of the men and women who worked the land. In the Europe of the 1930s, peasants were still the majority in most countries, and arable soil was a precious natural resource, bringing energy for economies still powered by animals and humans. Calories were counted, but for rather different reasons than they are counted now: economic planners had to make sure that populations could be kept fed, alive, and productive. Most of the states of Europe had no prospect of social transformation, and thus little ability to rival or counter the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland and other new east European states had tried land reform in the 1920s, but their efforts had proven insufficient. Landlords lobbied to keep their property, and banks and states were miserly with credit to peasants. The end of democracy across the region (except in Czechoslovakia) at first brought little new thinking on economic matters. Authoritarian regimes in Poland, Hungary, and Romania had less hesitation about jailing opponents and better recourse to fine phrases about the nation. But none seemed to have much to offer in the way of a new economic policy during the Great Depression.
 
In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest - usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation - and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. -

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Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. -John Updike.

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Writers in farm village of Mo Yan.
  • I heard so many stories from Gaomi's peasants that I had an irrepressible urge to write them down. Today, Gaomi's peasants know that they have become famous around the world through my writings, but I think they are a little puzzled by this.

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