Wendell Berry
The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.Collection: Moving
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.Collection: Inspirational
To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.Collection: Heart
History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.Collection: Country
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.Collection: Enough
Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.Collection: Long
We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.Collection: Nature
The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.Collection: Freedom
Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'Collection: Drama
There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Government
There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.Collection: Sitting
Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.Collection: Sleep
The issue here really is not whether international trade shall be free but whether or not it makes any sense for a country - or, for that matter, a region - to destroy its own capacity to produce its own food. 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?Collection: Country
I think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car," it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?Collection: Dream
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.Collection: Complaining
Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.Collection: Giving Up
Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.Collection: Peace
A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.Collection: Heart
... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.Collection: Drinking
Specialization is the great evil of civilization.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Air
The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.Collection: Men
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark.Collection: Dark
It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.Collection: Reading
We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.Collection: Simple
You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.Collection: Men
For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.Collection: Christian
When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.Collection: Self
A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.Collection: Education
The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.Collection: Way
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.Collection: Pride
The chance you had is the life you've got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people's lives, ...but you mustn't wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else.Collection: People
It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.Collection: Long
The problems are our lives. In the "developed" countries, at least, the large problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong. It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.Collection: Country
As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.Collection: Long
I think the issues of identity mostly are poppycock. We are what we have done, which includes our promises, includes our hopes, but promises first.Collection: Thinking
If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.Collection: Environmental
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.Collection: Betrayal
The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.Collection: Community
Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?Collection: Children
Physical health doesn't exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.Collection: Real
If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Miracle
O Thou, Far off and here, whole and broken, Who in necessity and in bounty wait, Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken, By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.Collection: Dark
But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.Collection: Fall
I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.Collection: Prayer
[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy. (pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")Collection: Order
And having thoughtlessly polluted our streams and rivers, we have seen in recent years a rapidly growing market for bottled drinking water. I am sure that some will say that a rapidly growing market for water is "good for the economy," and most of us are still affluent enough to pay the cost. Nevertheless, it is a considerable cost that we are now paying for drinkable water, which we once had in plentiful supply at little cost or none at all. And the increasing of the cost suggests that the time may come when the cost will be unaffordable.Collection: Drinking