Quote

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

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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
Value
Forests
Inconceivably
Almost
Soil
Soils
Values
Permanent
Kentucky
Words
Burden
Burnt
Order
Conservative
Transient
Including
Coal
Mountain
Mountains
Waste
Destroying
Pollutant

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world? (pg. 215, Economy and Pleasure)
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Love changes, and in change is true.
Wendell Berry
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All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
Wendell Berry
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The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
Wendell Berry
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To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
Wendell Berry
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Don't pray for the rain to stop pray for good luck fishing when the river floods.
Wendell Berry
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The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflied that fly up in flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.
Wendell Berry
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One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.
Wendell Berry
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The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
Wendell Berry
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I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Wendell Berry
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Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in justice or in affirmation of rights or in defense of peace do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
Wendell Berry
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Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.
Wendell Berry
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You can't live entirely alone. You have to have some kind of a support system.
Wendell Berry
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As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no intellectual property, and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.
Wendell Berry
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If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
Wendell Berry
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Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
Wendell Berry
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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
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The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
Wendell Berry
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My label is just good farming, which isn't something you can put on a t-shirt.
Wendell Berry
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The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
Wendell Berry