Quote

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

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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Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.
Wendell Berry
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A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
Wendell Berry
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Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.
Wendell Berry
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Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
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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It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.
Wendell Berry
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A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.
Wendell Berry
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Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
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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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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A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
Wendell Berry
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To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.
Wendell Berry
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You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.
Wendell Berry
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The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.
Wendell Berry
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We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
Wendell Berry
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If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
Wendell Berry
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Corn and bean people, I'm afraid, have extremely specialized minds.
Wendell Berry
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It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Wendell Berry
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Sit and be still until in the time of no rain you hear beneath the dry wind's commotion in the trees the sound of flowing water among the rocks, a stream unheard before, and you are where breathing is prayer.
Wendell Berry