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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 Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
People
Global
Locality
Commitment
Derive
National
Genuinely
Offers
Locals
Principles
Controlled
Security
Local
Economy
Measure
Neighborly
Cannot
Principle
Localities

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)
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Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
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A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
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People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
Wendell Berry
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But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.
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Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve-both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
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The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
Wendell Berry
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I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
Wendell Berry
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Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Wendell Berry
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We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.
Wendell Berry
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The world is whole beyond human knowing.
Wendell Berry
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There are some things the arrogant mind does not see it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.
Wendell Berry
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To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
Wendell Berry
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The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.
Wendell Berry
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A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
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When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.
Wendell Berry
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The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.
Wendell Berry
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When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
Wendell Berry