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every one but an ideot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious:: I do not mean that the poor in England are to be kept like the poor of France; but the state of the country considered, they must be (like all mankind) in poverty, or they will not work.

— Arthur Young Arthur Young (1771)

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More quotes by Arthur Young

A country is signally blessed above others, which can grow Indian corn.

to Arthur Young in: Henry Colman (1848)

Give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert…. The magic of PROPERTY turns sand to gold.

Small properties, much divided, prove the greatest source of misery that can possibly be conceived, and has operated to such a degree and extent in France, that a law ought certainly to be made to render all division below a certain number of arpens illegal.

Arthur Young (1789)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Young (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.