Quote

If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.

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
Obviously
Conversation
Winning
Start
Talk
Difficult
Resolution
Right
Assumption
Must
Dialogue

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
Wendell Berry
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I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
Wendell Berry
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It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
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 must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.
Wendell Berry
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You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.
Wendell Berry
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The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed
Wendell Berry
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O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.
Wendell Berry
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and in some of the people of the town and community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were somewhere else.
Wendell Berry
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I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.
Wendell Berry
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A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
Wendell Berry
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Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
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When despair for the world grows in me... I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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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The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
Wendell Berry
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The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
Wendell Berry
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All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.
Wendell Berry
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You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.
Wendell Berry
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Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
Wendell Berry
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Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.
Wendell Berry