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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.
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
Men
Irresponsibility
Think
Doings
Thinking
Permanence
Life
Temporary
Dealing
Dangerous
Kind
Always
More quotes by Wendell Berry
People talk about job creation, as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
Wendell Berry
If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.
Wendell Berry
The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
Wendell Berry
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.
Wendell Berry
Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.
Wendell Berry
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
Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following, there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water. There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make they are going down as fast as they can, but their sound seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.
Wendell Berry
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
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...
Wendell Berry
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
The hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.
Wendell Berry
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
We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal peace treaties. We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.
Wendell Berry
It's the impeded stream that sings
Wendell Berry
It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.
Wendell Berry
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
Wendell Berry
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Wendell Berry
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
If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
Wendell Berry
An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
