Wendell Berry Quotes About Values

Quotes about: Values

• Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.

  Wendell Berry

  Beautiful, Lying, Believe

  Wendell Berry, Daniel Kemmis, Courtney White (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.23, Counterpoint Press

• We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

  Wendell Berry

  Life, People, Needs

  Wendell Berry (2001). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint Press

• We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.

  Wendell Berry

  Air, Water, Degrees

• In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.

  Wendell Berry

  Kentucky, Order, Ifs And

  "Taking Care of What We’ve Been Given". Interview with Thomas P. Healy, www.counterpunch.org. April 15, 2006.

• To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.80, Counterpoint Press

• If in the human economy, a squash in the field is worth more than a bushel of soil, that does not mean that food is more valuable than soil; it means simply that we do not know how to value the soil. In its complexity and its potential longevity, the soil exceeds our comprehension; we do not know how to place a just market value on it, and we will never learn how. Its value is inestimable; we must value it, beyond whatever price we put on it, by respecting it.

  Wendell Berry

  Mean, Land, Squash

• The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

  Wendell Berry

  Past, Hatred, Innovation

• The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

  Wendell Berry

  Animal, Evil, Hierarchy

  Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words”, p.149, Counterpoint Press

• A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.

  Wendell Berry

  Heart, Practice, Luxury

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.250, Counterpoint

• You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.

  Wendell Berry

  Soul, Body, Devalue

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.84, Counterpoint

• The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.

  Wendell Berry

  Environment, Natural, Term

  Wendell Berry (2017). “The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry”, p.160, Penguin UK

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