Quote

I believe until fairly recently our destructions of nature were more or less unwitting -- the by-products, so to speak, of our ignorance or weakness or depravity. It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is a new thing under the sun.

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
World
Ignorance
Depravity
Present
Plunder
Less
Fairly
Natural
Recently
Unwitting
Speak
Destruction
Elaborately
Nature
Weakness
Rationalized
Thing
Sun
Rape
Believe
Products
Principled

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.
Wendell Berry
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We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.
Wendell Berry
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There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
Wendell Berry
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You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.
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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The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Wendell Berry
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There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.
Wendell Berry
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I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
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Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.
Wendell Berry
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At night make me one with the darkness In the morning make me one with the light.
Wendell Berry
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Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.
Wendell Berry
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The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
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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The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
Wendell Berry
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I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
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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These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
Wendell Berry
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In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
Wendell Berry
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Explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.
Wendell Berry
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A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Wendell Berry