Montaigne

So many goodly citties ransacked and razed; so many nations destroyed and made desolate; so infinite millions of harmless people of all sexes, states and ages, massacred, ravaged and put to the sword; and the richest, the fairest and the best part of the world topsiturvied (topsy-turvy), ruined and defaced for the traffick of Pearles and Pepper: Oh, mechanicall victories, oh base conquest. Montainge

Thomas Jefferson

...it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of the state...

Isaiah 5:8, 12a

Woe to those who add house to house
and join field to field
until everywhere belongs to them
and they are the sole inhabitants.

But they do not pay attention to the deeds of the Lord,

Nor do they consider the work of His hands.

E.P. Roe

Nothing can conduce more to happiness and prosperity than multitudes of rural homes. In such abodes you will not find Socialists, Nihilists, and other hare-brained reformers who seek to improve the world by ignoring nature and common sense. Possession of the soil makes a man conservative, while he, at the same time, is conserved.

Sustainable Living, Wendall Berry

Industrialism begins with technological invention. But agrarianism begins with
givens: land, plants, animals, weather, hunger and the birthright knowledge of
agriculture. Industrialists are always ready to ignore, sell, or destroy the past in
order to gain the entirely unprecedented wealth, comfort, and happiness
supposedly to be found in the future. Agrarian farmers know that their very
identity depends on their willingness to receive gratefully, use responsibly and
hand down intact an inheritance, both natural and cultural, from the past.
Agrarians understand themselves as the users and caretakers of some things they
did not make, and of some things that they cannot make. Wendall Berry

Virgil

I saw a man,
An old Cilician, who occupied
An acre or two of land that no one wanted,
A patch not worth the ploughing, unrewarding
For flocks, unfit for vineyards; he however
By planting here and there among the scrub
Cabbages or white lilies and verbena
And flimsy poppies, fancied himself a king
In wealth, and coming home late in the evening
Loaded his board with unbought delicacies.

Thoreau

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

“You must converse much with the field and woods, if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains

The Civilized Savage

In 1835, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the great English manufacturing city
Manchester: “From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the
whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete
development and its most brutish; here civilization makes its miracles, and civilized man is
turned back almost into a savage.”

For, truly, the man who does not know how to die, does not know how to live. John Ruskin