A Quote by Ruth Benedict

War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.

Ruth Benedict

Quote Topics

Conditions Earth Eliminated Grows Havoc History How Natural Natural History Old Plant Plays Soil Tell Us War Would

Quote Author

Ruth Benedict
American - Scientist
June 5, 1887 - September 17, 1948

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.

Luther Standing Bear

The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?

Ellen Key

A guy says, I'm so old that I forgot how old I am. An old woman says, I'll tell you how old you are. Take off your clothes and bend over. The man does this. The woman says, You're seventy four. The man says, How can you tell? The woman says, You told me yesterday.

Henny Youngman

Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper.

Herman Melville

The earth is a machine which yields almost gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins. The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

John Milton

On your 60th, here's something philosophical To give the old grey matter a stir How old would you be If you didn't know how old you were?

John Walter Bratton

The glorious chariots of kings wear out, and the body wears out and grows old; but the virtue of the good never grows old.

Gautama Buddha

Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.

Lyman Abbott

Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

Douglas MacArthur

I suppose the old natural stuff would be ok, the old mushroom, but I wouldn't advise anyone to do it.

Noel Redding

A lot of companies have lots of assets tied up in plant and equipment. Well, is it old plant, or is it new plant?

Walter Schloss

The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.

William Hazlitt

Old Lights include the resurgent fundamentalists in every religion who put a freeze on history and fortify their adherents against the "new dark age" in which they are forced to live. "Back to the Bible," Old Lights shout; "back to the Koran," Old Lights thunder. But not everything Old Lights say is wrong. Much is right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, the old adage reminds us.