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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.

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
Would
Rule
Shovels
Prove
Dime
Use
Dimes
Seems
Acknowledged
Power
Steam
Must
Experts
Great
Pick
Way
Picks
Shovel

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole.
Wendell Berry
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The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.
Wendell Berry
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He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
Wendell Berry
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Action can only be understood in relation to place only by staying in place can the imagination conceive or understand action in terms of consequence, of cause and effect. The meaning of action in time is inseparable from its meaning in place.
Wendell Berry
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Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.
Wendell Berry
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It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.
Wendell Berry
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I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
Wendell Berry
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I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
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So friends, every day do something that won't compute.
Wendell Berry
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Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Wendell Berry
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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
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But love, sooner or later, forces us out of time...of all that we feel and do, all the virtues and all the sins, love alone crowds us at last over the edge of the world. For love is always more than a little strange here...It is in the world, but is not altogether of it. It is of eternity. It takes us there when it most holds us here.
Wendell Berry
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The developed nations had given to the free market the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.
Wendell Berry
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We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
Wendell Berry
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The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
Wendell Berry
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One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
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The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
Wendell Berry