Over time, yes, countries will need to look at specific GMO products like they look at drugs today, where they don’t approve them all. They look hard at the safety and the testing. And they make sure that the benefits far outweigh any of the downsides.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

I received free health care.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

In the 21st century, the countries that thrive will be the ones where citizens know their voices will be heard because the institutions are transparent.

Thanh Hoa itself is a rich agricultural province. Rice fields, a pattern of many shades of green, stretch far into the distance along the road, which also winds through foothills and the fringes of heavy jungle where tigers are said to roam. The vegetation, wild or cultivated, is lush.

If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

I’m the same kid who used to hop the trains with headphones and just go to downtown Manhattan, walk around and listen to music or walk through the city. The fame restricts that. It’s a small complaint in comparison to the benefits I get from it, but the restrictive part is what I don’t like – and the fact that it’s not reversible.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

Doing nothing while the middle class is hurting. That’s not leadership. Loose regulations and lax enforcement. That’s not leadership. That’s abandoning our middle class.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible.

If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal? To me, that did not add up.

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense; benefits ought to be handed ought drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.

I don’t think there is anything wrong in earning money from the sport you love. If you work hard and get benefits from it, there is no harm. The day you feel that you are not working hard and are only looking at the benefits, that’s where the problem is.

Every Republican’s voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the – he said in the first 100 days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules – unchain Wall Street. They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.

The effort to try to present the Social Security program as if it’s a major problem, that’s just a hidden way of trying to undermine and destroy it.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.

Wall Street apparently takes and then forgets, and then comes after the guns of law-abiding American citizens and small businesses.

In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.

Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

There are certain age limits on police officers. They’d have retired me out at 65.

Laws are silent in time of war.

The U.S. automotive industry has been selling cars the same way for over 100 years, and there are many laws in place to govern exactly how that is to be accomplished.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.

Agriculture not only gives riches to a nation, but the only riches she can call her own.

Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.

The biggest and most deadly ‚tax‘ rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits – food stamps, housing subsidies and the like – if their income goes up.

Benefits should be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

If there’s something dangerous, sauces are dangerous for the body.

My early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds.

The ‚Maddox Jolie-Pitt‘ Foundation’s work is inspired by our children and their connections to particular countries.

Value is what you get.

The rules are there for a reason.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

I think there should be regulations on social media to the degree that it negatively affects the public good.

As president, Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations, but he also raised taxes when necessary.

The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

In truth, I did enjoy the benefits of a Harvard connection.