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Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.

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
Believe
Nation
Perhaps
Serious
Fantasists
Animal
Availability
Nations
Finite
Nature
Apparently
Become
Infinite
Problem
Resources

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Today, local economies are being destroyed by the 'pluralistic,' displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
Wendell Berry
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We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.
Wendell Berry
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
Wendell Berry
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The language that reveals also obscures.
Wendell Berry
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We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.
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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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
Wendell Berry
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When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.
Wendell Berry
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The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.
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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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
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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To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.
Wendell Berry
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Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.
Wendell Berry
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Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world's beauty and abundance.
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
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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
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We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.
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