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We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.

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
Concerned
Environment
Land
Desecration
Flag
Flags

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves.
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If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.
Wendell Berry
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The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
Wendell Berry
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The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.
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These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
Wendell Berry
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We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.
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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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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The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.
Wendell Berry
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The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.
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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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
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The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.
Wendell Berry
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There are some things the arrogant mind does not see it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.
Wendell Berry
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A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
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We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
Wendell Berry
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No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to spiritual subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history's most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.
Wendell Berry
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But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.
Wendell Berry
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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
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You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.
Wendell Berry