The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.
WENDELL BERRYThe fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
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And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
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And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
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These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
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Whether we or our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
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The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
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Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.
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To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
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We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.
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Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.
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If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.
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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
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The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
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