“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.”

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

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.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

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.

The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.

It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn’t make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn’t live without them.

We don’t know how to get out of this malaise and I think we now have to consider more radical policies.

Rising inequality can create a more highly leveraged economy, and it can then make the economy vulnerable to a crash like 2008.

We are at a pivotal moment in our shared history. The global goals of a healthy planet, social equality, and economic opportunity for all are within reach. But we cannot prevaricate.

There is not Communism or Marxism, but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.

The capitalist system is not delivering those decade-after-decade increases it promised.

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.

On the other hand, a central bank can overregulate and choke the economy, and then we will have a dead banking industry.

I support the state, but not the state-run economy. The state should intervene only to create the conditions necessary for the private sector to thrive.