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Wendell Berry

94 quotes

“In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great — and successful — advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore “domestic violence” and think that our society can be pacified by “gun control.” Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously — a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare. For about half of the last century, we worried about world conquest by international communism. Now with less worry (so far) we are witnessing world conquest by international capitalism. Though its political means are milder (so far) than those of communism, this newly internationalized capitalism may prove even more destructive of human cultures and communities, of freedom, and of nature. Its tendency is just as much toward total dominance and control.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are disposed, somewhat by culture and somewhat by nature, to solve our problems by violence, and even to enjoy doing so. And yet by now all of us must at least have suspected that our right to live, to be free, and to be at peace is not guaranteed by any act of violence. It can be guaranteed only by our willingness that all other persons should live, be free, and be at peace — and by our willingness to use or give our own lives to make that possible.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can't do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To farm is to be placed absolutely.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A mind that has confronted ruin for years Is half or more a ruined mind.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Small creatures die because larger creatures are hungry. How superior to this human confusion of greed and creed, blood and fire.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What one has to say to begin with is that, as humans, we are limited in intelligence and we really have no reliable foresight. So none of us will come up with answers to the whole great problem. What we can do is judge our behavior, our history, and our present situation by a better standard than “efficiency” or “profit,” or those measures that we’re still using to determine economic decisions.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The standard that I always come back to is the health of the world, which is the same as our own personal health. We can’t distinguish our health from the health of everything else. And we know enough from the ecologists now to know that health is a very complex and un-understandable complexity of relationships that makes the world whole.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the roots of the problem is the focus of environmentalists. The conservation movement, for one hundred years, has, at least in this country, focused on wilderness preservation—places of spectacular rocks and waterfalls—at the expense of what I would call the “economic landscapes” of farming, forestry, and mining.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The politicians have kept the environmental movement quiet by designating wilderness areas. And in the meantime, they’ve let corporations run completely out of control, and extraordinarily destructively, in the economic landscapes, without any acknowledgement at all that the natural world is out there just the same as it is in the parks.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Small farms make economic sense. They also produce more happiness, more beauty, more health—those things that aren’t so quantifiable...”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s far too much generalization now about rural America. Conservatives and corporations have had their eye on rural America all along. And they’ve been turning it into money as fast as they can, which is to say destroying the land and the people...”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The problem is that rural America has been a colony, certainly throughout my lifetime. I don’t think anybody’s paid attention to rural America since about 1945 or ’50. Certainly not since 1952, when Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture said to the farmers: “Get big or get out.” They’ve just abandoned rural America to corporations and technologies.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)
“Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)
“As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)
“To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment" in The Country of Marriage (1973)
“What I stand for is what I stand on.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Below" in A Part (1980)
“From the union of power and money, from the union of power and secrecy, from the union of government and science, from the union of government and art, from the union of science and money, from the union of ambition and ignorance, from the union of genius and war, from the union of outer space and inner vacuity, the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union" in Entries (1997)
“I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until "retirement," but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never compass with their understanding or desire.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Unforeseen Wilderness : An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (1971), p. 33; what is likely a paraphrase of a portion of this has existed since at least 1997, and has sometimes become misattributed to John James Au…
“It is impossible to care for each other more or differently than we care for the earth. This last statement becomes obvious enough when it is considered that the earth is what we all have in common, that it is what we are made of and what we live from, and that we therefore cannot damage it without damaging those with whom we share it. But I believe it goes farther and deeper than that. There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Between our relation to our own sexuality and our relation to the reproductivity of the earth, for instance, the resemblance is plain and strong. By some connection we do not recognize, the willingness to exploit one becomes the willingness to exploit the other.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Unsettling of America (1977), Chapter Seven : The Body and the Earth
“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 (1934–2026) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Compromise, Hell!" Orion magazine (November/December 2004)
“We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to "win the hearts and minds of the people" by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the "truth" of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. … I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Statement Against the War in Vietnam" an address at the University of Kentucky (10 February 1968)
“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 (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: 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? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who live at the lower ends of watersheds cannot be isolationists — or not for long. Pretty soon they will notice that water flows, and that will set them to thinking about the people upstream who either do or do not send down their silt and pollutants and garbage. Thinking about the people upstream out to cause further thinking about the people downstream. Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers — or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed — might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap-energy civilization, in which “economic health” depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. To hear the second muse one must move outside the cheap-energy enclosure. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) said by 2026 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. 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. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.”
Wendell Berry (1934–2026) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" in Farming: A Hand Book (1970)