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Quotes by Educator
"In politics, familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It breeds votes."
20
"The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism."
19
"At this level, the individual perceives the maintenance of the expectations of his family, group, or nation as valuable in its own right, regardless of immediate and obvious consequences."
19
"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers."
19
"It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction."
18
"But human nature is not to be totally changed even by such a force as the Reformation."
18
"The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black."
18
"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
18
"Without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north."
17
"The increase in the world's population represents our victory against death."
17
"I worry when athletes are simply used by their universities to produce revenue, to make money for them, nothing to show at the back end. I grew up with a lot of players who had very, very tough lives after the ball started bouncing for them. And that's why I'm going to continue to fight."
17
"Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised."
17
"If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact."
17
"This is part of human nature, the desire to change consciousness."
17
"Though they won't say, it has been estimated that Cargill and ADM together probably buy somewhere near a third of all the corn grown in America."
17
"So this is what commodity corn can do to a cow: industrialize the miracle of nature that is a ruminant, taking this sunlight- and prairie grass-powered organism and turning it into the last thing we need: another fossil fuel machine. This one, however, is able to suffer."
16
"More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most."
16
"To a very great extent, it's the fast-food industry that really industrialized our agriculture - that drove the system to one variety of chicken grown very quickly in confinement, to the feedlot system for beef, to giant monocultures to grow potatoes. All of those thing flow from the desire of fast-food companies for a perfectly consistent product."
16
"The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic, people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn."
16
"Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do."
16
"The individual makes a clear effort to define moral values and principles that have validity and application apart from the authority of the groups of persons holding them and apart from the individual's own identification with the group."
16
"Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring."
15
"You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned."
15
"By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60% of it, or some 50k kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America's 100 million beef cattle."
15
"For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food."
15
"Researchers have found that people (and animals) presented with large portions will eat up to 30 percent more than they could otherwise. Human appetite, it turns out, is surprisingly elastic, which makes excellent evolutionary sense: It behooved our hunter gatherer ancestors to feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to build up reserves of fat against future famine."
15
"But carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] doesn't lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn.... Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that's us: processed corn, walking."
15
"I have had the good fortune to see how my articles have directly benefited some farmers and helped build markets for their products in a way that preserves land from development. That makes me a hopeless optimist."
15
"Memory is the enemy of wonder."
15
"When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we're being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don't have a very good vocabulary to describe what others species do to us, because we think we're the only species that really does anything."
15
"The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them."
15
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