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You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

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
Passes
Serve
Civilization
Usually
Best

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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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.
Wendell Berry
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry
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Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.
Wendell Berry
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What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
Wendell Berry
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But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.
Wendell Berry
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The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
Wendell Berry
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The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.
Wendell Berry
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Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.
Wendell Berry
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry
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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
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If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
Wendell Berry
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Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
Wendell Berry
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There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.
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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A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
Wendell Berry
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It gets darker and darker and darker, and then Jesus is born.
Wendell Berry
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The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
Wendell Berry
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At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment-everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue. But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time.
Wendell Berry