There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

When the Revolution triumphed in 1959, our island was a true Yankee colony. The United States had duped and disarmed our Liberation Army. One couldn’t speak of developed agriculture, but of immense plantations exploited on the base of manual and animal labour that in general used neither fertilizers nor machinery.

Let’s face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

I think any statement about stock prices is always suspect unless it’s made by Warren Buffett.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

I’m an atheist.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don’t have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Whoever feels predestined to see and not to believe will find all believers too noisy and pushy: he guards against them.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

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.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven’t eaten for three hours, we think we’re starving. You’re not starving – human beings can go for 30 days without food.

When you are nominated for the best player in Europe, the Ballon d’Or, playing in the Champions League, there is so much pressure. You don’t know what will happen. This pressure is inside you – you always have it.

It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.

I think long term you can see Tesla establishing factories in Europe, in other parts of the U.S. and in Asia.

In New York I pretty much live in diners – I order French Fries, Diet Coke floats and lots of coffee.

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

China is a great manufacturing center, but it’s actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial – more advanced industrial centers – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe – and it basically assembles them.

Are we simply waving farewell to the days when some of the most interesting thinking in Europe and America came to us from our fiction film-makers? BBC2, which once introduced and showed great films, now shows none.

Trust, but verify.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

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.

I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

Sowing is not as difficult as reaping.

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

I try to very hard to avoid a situation where I would be eating cat or dog; I’ve managed to gracefully avoid that. It’s hypocritical of me and an arbitrary line, but one that I have managed to avoid crossing.

I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province.

I think that growing up in a crowded continent like Europe with an awful lot of competing claims, ideas… cultures… and systems of thought, we have, perforce, developed a more sophisticated notion of what the word ‚freedom‘ means than I see much evidence of in America.

France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a ‚third force,‘ independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course.

I did this book ‚Harvest for Hope,‘ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

WWE asked me to be in the Hall of Fame, and I turned it down. You know why? They put Pete Rose in the wrestling Hall of Fame. This guy can’t even get into his own Hall of Fame.

French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody’s afraid of French fries.

The Christian missionary may preach the gospel to the poor naked heathen, but the spiritual heathen who populate Europe have as yet heard nothing of Christianity.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

You can’t trust very many people.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

All in all, I just don’t trust journalists – and I don’t think it’s a good practice for me to trust journalists.

My weaknesses have always been food and men – in that order.

I have seen firsthand that agricultural science has enormous potential to increase the yields of small farmers and lift them out of hunger and poverty.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

We never repent of having eaten too little.

I’ll bring my grits when I travel, because I get so hungry on the road.

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.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

There is one thing I have never taught my body how to do and that is to figure out at 6 A.M. what it wants to eat at 6 P.M.

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.

All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.