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

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Willing to die you give up your will keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
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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.
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A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.
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What would be the point of being personally whole in a dismembered society, or personally healthy in a land scalped, eroded and poisoned, or personally free in a world entirely controlled by the government or enlightened by television?
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A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
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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The two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment.
Wendell Berry
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Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
Wendell Berry
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We live the given life, and not the planned.
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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And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present
Wendell Berry
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The old and honorable idea of 'vocation' is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.
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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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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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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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Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.
Wendell Berry
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The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
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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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