Wendell Berry Quotes - Page 15

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• To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known...The "animal scientist" to whom it is of no concern whether or not animals suffer will almost inevitably aid and abet the destruction of the decent old ideal of animal husbandry and, as a consequence, increase the suffering of animals. I hope that my country may be delivered from the remote, cold abstractions of university science.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Animal, Pet

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• We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, Long, Warfare

  Wendell Berry's Commencement Address at Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky, May 14, 2005.

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• People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.

  Wendell Berry

  Nature, People, Want

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• This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy.

  Wendell Berry

  Ignorance, Character, Oil

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.20, Counterpoint

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• That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.

  Wendell Berry

  Should Have, Land, Agriculture

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.37, Counterpoint

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• It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Sacred, World

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• Under the rule of the "free market" ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.

  Wendell Berry

  Two, Oil, Energy

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

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• The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.

  Wendell Berry

  People, Survival, Important

  Wendell Berry (2009). “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”, p.155, Counterpoint Press

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• Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free and should be encouraged to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

  Wendell Berry

  Running, Long, Suits

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.266, Counterpoint

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• I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle... Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight.
  What I fear in it leaves it, And the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song.

  Wendell Berry

  Song, Lying, Sight

  Wendell Berry (1998). “A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997”, Counterpoint LLC

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• The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.

  Wendell Berry

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Leavings: Poems”, p.13, Counterpoint Press

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• When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.

  Wendell Berry

  Government, Citizens, Principles

  Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.27, Counterpoint Press

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• As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.

  Wendell Berry

  Long, Strange, Aliens

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• For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

  Wendell Berry

  Success, Mean, Law

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• 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

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• There are two laws that we had better take to be absolute. The first is that as we cannot exempt ourselves from living in this world, then if we wish to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from using the world. If we cannot exempt ourselves from use, then we must deal with the issues raised by use. And so the second law is that if we want to continue living, we cannot exempt use from care.

  Wendell Berry

  Inspiring, Law, Two

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• Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

  Wendell Berry

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

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• The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.

  Wendell Berry

  Taken, Agriculture, Individuality

  Wendell Berry (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.45, Counterpoint Press

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• Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

  Wendell Berry

  Self, Restraint, Killjoy

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• Long live gravity! Long live
  stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
  of fantasy capitalism!

  Wendell Berry

  Errors, Long, Stupidity

  Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stanley, David Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim (2013). “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”, p.80, The Golden Sufi Center

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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.

  Wendell Berry

  Sheep, Nurse, Barns

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• An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

  Wendell Berry

  Art, Scar, Geography

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.7, Counterpoint Press

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• We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.

  Wendell Berry

  Suicidal, Ephemeral, Sake

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.201, Counterpoint

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• The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, People, Essentials

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• And if we ask what are the cultural resources that can inform and sustain a proper creaturely and stewardly awareness of the lives in a farmer's keeping, I believe that we will find them gathered under the heading of husbandry.

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Awareness, Resources

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food”, p.75, Counterpoint Press

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