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It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.

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
Best
Governs
Needs
Governing
Much
Neglected
Think
Citizen
Thinking
Citizens
Least
Certain
Government
Corollary

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
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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We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?
Wendell Berry
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The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
Wendell Berry
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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Wendell Berry
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When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.
Wendell Berry
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We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Wendell Berry
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So it is that the life force may take possession of a man-- so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
Wendell Berry
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Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
Wendell Berry
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The only true and effective operator's manual for spaceship earth is not a book that any human will ever write it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
Wendell Berry
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You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
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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Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
Wendell Berry
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Having hope is hard harder when you get older.
Wendell Berry
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It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
Wendell Berry
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Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Wendell Berry
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It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams. Or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around.
Wendell Berry
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
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Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve-both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.
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