These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
Interpretation
This quote speaks to the deep commitment individuals can have towards justice, emphasizing the sincerity and increasing intensity of their devotion over time.
Wendell Berry highlights the essence of true devotion to justice, suggesting that there are individuals who not only proclaim their dedication but also live it out publicly. He implies that such dedication is not static; rather, it grows stronger with time, underscoring the importance of sincerity and a steadfast commitment to what is right.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might say, 'As Wendell Berry points out, these are people who are capable of devotion to justice.'
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
And don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.
You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.
I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
One impossible day, of an impossible month, of an impossible year.
We are passing into a social phase in which unless a heroic effort is made for human dignity and freedom, gold will be the sole method of government and therefore the sole standard of manners.
I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky, and I was missing it.
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