Quote

We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.

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
Enemy
Everybody
Alone
Hope
Cannot
Readiness
Government
Declared
Willingness
Secure

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
Wendell Berry
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If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.
Wendell Berry
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An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.
Wendell Berry
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In losing stewardship we lose fellowship we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
Wendell Berry
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The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.
Wendell Berry
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We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.
Wendell Berry
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You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
Wendell Berry
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The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.
Wendell Berry
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It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
Wendell Berry
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I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.
Wendell Berry
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An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.
Wendell Berry
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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
Wendell Berry
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I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And this is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving. We are alive within mystery, by miracle.
Wendell Berry
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The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
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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When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.
Wendell Berry
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It surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don't love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.
Wendell Berry
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Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life stay away from screens.
Wendell Berry