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It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.

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
Persons
Condemn
Person
Alternative
Thing
Alternatives
People
Mad
Offer
Offers
Failure
Wrong

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope. What good did I get from it? I got to have love in my heart.
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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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
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If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.
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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We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.
Wendell Berry
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In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
Wendell Berry
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If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Wendell Berry
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I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.
Wendell Berry
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It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
Wendell Berry
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The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.
Wendell Berry
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But we can do nothing for the human future that we will not do for the human present. For the amelioration of the future condition of our kind we must look, not to the wealth or the genius of the coming generations, but to the quality of the disciplines and attitudes that we are preparing now for their use.
Wendell Berry
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If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.
Wendell Berry
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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
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Having hope is hard harder when you get older.
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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The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.
Wendell Berry
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
Wendell Berry
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We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
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