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.
WENDELL BERRYIt 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.
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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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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 care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
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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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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…
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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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There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.
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The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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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 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 BERRY