Wendell Berry Quotes About Assumption

Quotes about: Assumption

• We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.

  Wendell Berry

  Effort, Would Be, World

• If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.

  Wendell Berry

  Winning, Assumption, Resolution

• A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

  Wendell Berry

  Past, Needs, Assumption

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.121, Counterpoint

• The assumption is that people so ignorant and thoughtless and silly and greedy may simply call upon the Army Corps of Engineers in order to receive a clean and abundant supply of water from reservoirs in the mountains. A much likelier outcome is that they will be drinking an ever stronger mixture of sewage and mine acid and mud and cropspray and various other defecations of the industrial paradise.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Silly, Army

• The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Simple, Years

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.178, Counterpoint Press

• Supporters of the war are constantly asking those who oppose it: Why don't you deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side? The answer, so far as I am concerned, is that I do deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side. But I am responsible for the wrongs and atrocities committed by our side. And I am no longer able to participate in the assumption that atrocities committed by remote control are less objectionable than those committed at arm's length. I am most concerned with American obstacles to peace because I am an American.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Atrocities Committed, Asking

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