Quote

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

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
People
Help
Invented
Helping
Main
Better
City
Need
Realize
Country
Cities
Needs
Question
Industrial
Thing
Wasn
Invent
Thinking
Realizing
Agriculture

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.
Wendell Berry
Image
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
Wendell Berry
Image
If you grow a garden you are going to shed some sweat, and you are going to spend some time bent over you will experience some aches and pains. But it is in the willingness to accept this discomfort that we strike the most telling blow against the power plants and what they represent.
Wendell Berry
Image
We can fight the global economy with a strong local economy.
Wendell Berry
Image
Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.
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
The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.
Wendell Berry
Image
Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.
Wendell Berry
Image
There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Wendell Berry
Image
To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
It is only by understanding the cultural complexity and largeness of the concept of agriculture that we can see the threatening diminishments implied by the term 'agribusiness.'
Wendell Berry
Image
There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
Image
We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Wendell Berry
Image
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
Wendell Berry
Image
There's a world of difference . . . between that information to which we now presumably have access by way of computers, libraries, and the rest of it, great stockpiles of data, and the knowledge that people have in their bones by which they do good work and live good lives.
Wendell Berry
Image
In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.
Wendell Berry
Image
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
Wendell Berry
Image
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.
Wendell Berry
Image
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