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Connexions Quotations
Wendell Berry
Quotes
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Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production
and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply,
not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free
– and should be encouraged – to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.
- Wendell Berry
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A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared,
and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.
It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other,
the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
- Wendell Berry
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How can a government, entrusted with the safety and health of its people,
conscientiously barter away in the name of an economic idea that people’s ability to feed itself?
And if people lose their ability to feed themselves, how can they be said to be free?
- Wendell Berry
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If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics;
its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work,
and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear,
and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech?
In a totalitarian economy, any “political liberties” that the people might retain would simply cease to matter.
If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy,
then what is your vote worth?
- Wendell Berry
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The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ...
to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We’re living, it seems,
in the culmination of a long warfare – warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
- Wendell Berry
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Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it.
- Wendell Berry
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Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. 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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Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm – which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
- Wendell Berry
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Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.
- Wendell Berry
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Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.
- Wendell Berry
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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
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There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
- Wendell Berry
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To imply by the word “terrorism” that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of “terrorists” is misleading. The “legitimate” warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents.
- Wendell Berry
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Today, local economies are being destroyed by the ‘pluralistic,’ displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
- Wendell Berry
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We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all – by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians – be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
- Wendell Berry
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What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.
- Wendell Berry
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