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To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.

Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
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Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
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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)
Wendell Berry
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We must see that it is foolish, sinful and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral.
Wendell Berry
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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
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To be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
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 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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The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.
Wendell Berry
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Willing to die you give up your will keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
Wendell Berry
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The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
Wendell Berry
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A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Wendell Berry
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A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
Wendell Berry
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The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.
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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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
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Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call the economy or the free market is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
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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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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I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)
Wendell Berry
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The world is whole beyond human knowing.
Wendell Berry
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We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it.
Wendell Berry