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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

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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
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Economy
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Cultural
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More quotes by Wendell Berry

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You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction
Wendell Berry
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One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.
Wendell Berry
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The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
Wendell Berry
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Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
Wendell Berry
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A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done.
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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There are no unsacred places there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Wendell Berry
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How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves
Wendell Berry
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I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water. My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle... Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it, And the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song.
Wendell Berry
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The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
Wendell Berry
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
Wendell Berry
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The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
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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To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.
Wendell Berry
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Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.
Wendell Berry
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Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
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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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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It's mighty hard right now to think of anything that's precious that isn't endangered. There are no sacred and unsacred places there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.
Wendell Berry
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For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
Wendell Berry