Quote

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato

Wendell Berry

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Citizens
Potato
Produce
Puberty
Baby
Potatoes
Age
Understands
Citizen
Thirty
Model
Models
Sophisticate

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.
Wendell Berry
Image
The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials it honors the place where it is done it honors the art by which it is done it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.
Wendell Berry
Image
Our Children no longer learn how to read the great book of Nature from their own direct experience, or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water come from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.
Wendell Berry
Image
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry
Image
Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We are now, measurably, reducing the availability of these life-supporting goods which we can think of (though only on the conditions of good health and good care) as self-renewing or sustainable. We are also destroying rapidly the supplies of the fossil fuels, which are limited and not renewable, and on which we have become totally dependent.
Wendell Berry
Image
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry
Image
You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction
Wendell Berry
Image
Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.
Wendell Berry
Image
But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
Wendell Berry
Image
To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
Image
I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
Wendell Berry