Quote

There are lots of bad things that can happen to a food economy that's both extensive and centralized. There's no substitute for petroleum. To have a growth economy based on a declining fuel supply is bound to be stressful.

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
Things
Bounds
Declining
Lots
Extensive
Based
Stressful
Growth
Substitute
Food
Supply
Economy
Substitutes
Happen
Bound
Centralized
Happens
Fuel
Petroleum

More quotes by Wendell Berry

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All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman's silence receiving the river's grace, the gardener's musing on rows.
Wendell Berry
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.
Wendell Berry
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We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them. (pg. 43, The Unsettling of America)
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We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
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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Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Wendell Berry
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When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.
Wendell Berry
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Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
Wendell Berry
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A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
Wendell Berry
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There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
Wendell Berry
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So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Wendell Berry
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Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
Wendell Berry
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True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.
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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I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.
Wendell Berry
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People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
Wendell Berry
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It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
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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Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry
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It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
Wendell Berry