Quotes from Wendell Berry

You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.

Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.

It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction

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.

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.

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.

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.

All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

We live the given life, and not the planned.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And 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.

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

It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.

Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

When I rise uplet me rise up joyfullike a bird.When I falllet me fall without regretlike a leaf.

I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.

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.

The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.