“When we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works.” — Clive Thompson

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“I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature.” — Wendell Berry

“When tillage begins, other arts follow.  The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.” — Daniel Webster

“The use we make of one kind of land depends on the uses we make of all the other kinds.  Denver and environs is the proof.  If you turn the Rockies into a playground or, at best, an idealized wilderness, and if you reduce agricultural living to a vestige of an almost forgotten past, then you have successfully cleared the ground for paving the rest of the state clear to Kansas in one direction and to Wyoming in another.  To speak from a rural conscience—to say, simply, that this is the wrong way to go about things, a way that’s fostered by a deep human venality, a willingness to be bribed into ignorance—is to speak from a place of silence where no one expects to hear wisdom any more.” — Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life, 2003

“I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.” — William James

“Time was when all a man had to do was just farm eleven and a half months, and hunt the other half.  But not now.  Now just to belong to the farming business and the hunting business ain’t enough.  You got to belong to the business of mankind.” — William Faulkner, “Race at Morning”

“A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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