Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Wendell Berry
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: August 5
Author
Farmer
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Henry County
Kentucky
Wendell Berry
Wendell Erdman Berry
Seems
Soil
May
Absurd
Need
Exactly
Must
Based
Needs
Seem
Much
Food
Petroleum
Land
Agriculture
True
Nevertheless
More quotes by Wendell Berry
We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
Wendell Berry
I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.
Wendell Berry
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Wendell Berry
A farmer's market is worth more than everything I've written.
Wendell Berry
It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
Wendell Berry
When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together.
Wendell Berry
The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.
Wendell Berry
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.
Wendell Berry
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
Wendell Berry
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
Wendell Berry
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
I would consider myself simply a critic of the market economy. My standard isn't primarily political. First of all, it's ecological. And then I get to matters that are social and cultural.
Wendell Berry
Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.
Wendell Berry
So friends, every day do something that won't compute.
Wendell Berry
You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.
Wendell Berry
Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.
Wendell Berry
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
But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.
Wendell Berry
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
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
