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If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?

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
Devil
Smart
Exist
Doesn
Enough
People
Explain
Worse

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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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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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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A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Wendell Berry
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The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an object. This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
Wendell Berry
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In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.
Wendell Berry
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Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.
Wendell Berry
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Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
Wendell Berry
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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is you don't know what's going to happen.
Wendell Berry
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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
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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.
Wendell Berry
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Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
Wendell Berry
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We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, The Unsettling of America)
Wendell Berry
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Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.
Wendell Berry
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We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.
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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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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The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
Wendell Berry
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People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.
Wendell Berry
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Returning from the wilderness a man becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forbears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.
Wendell Berry