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.
WENDELL BERRYIf I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far:
More Wendell Berry Quotes
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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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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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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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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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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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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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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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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
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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’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.
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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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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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The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.
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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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