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.
WENDELL BERRYAnd 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.
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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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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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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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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A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
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To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.
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When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
WENDELL BERRY






