Quote

It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.

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
Think
Thinking
Enslavement
Alternative
Alternatives
Slave
Truly
Men

More quotes by Wendell Berry

Image
The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.
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 going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.
Wendell Berry
Image
I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
Image
When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
Wendell Berry
Image
To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for.
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Image
This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part the free world seems to be regarding it as merely normal.
Wendell Berry
Image
It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.
Wendell Berry
Image
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
Image
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
Image
To accept that there is nothing to do is to despair. It is to become in some fundamental way less than human. Those of us who are protesting are protesting in part for our own sake to keep ourselves whole as human beings.
Wendell Berry
Image
What could be more superstitious than the idea that money brings forth food?
Wendell Berry
Image
We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
Wendell Berry
Image
The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.
Wendell Berry
Image
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children...
Wendell Berry
Image
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
Image
It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
Wendell Berry
Image
We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
Wendell Berry