Wendell Berry

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.

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.

We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.

In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.

Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, pre-chewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare - with its inevitable massacre of innocents - as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and wasteful.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.

I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

Long live gravity! Long live_x000D_ stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces_x000D_ of fantasy capitalism!