List of Wendell Berry Quotes

You've Got To Reach Towards A Better Language, And You're Not Going To Make It Up From Scratch; You've Got To Reach Back Into The Tradition. Western Tradition Is Not As Impoverished As A Lot Of People Would Like To Think, But You'd Have To Go Back Before The Industrial Revolution; You May Have To Go Back Farther Than That. Of Course, The Bible Has A Perfectly Adequate Language, But It's Suffered A Lot Of Thoughtless Wear.

Hunger Is A Powerful Persuader If It Happens, And It's Conceivable That It Could Happen. Country People Have Always Known This.

My Label Is Just "good Farming", Which Isn't Something You Can Put On A T-shirt.

The Most Available Example Of How Poetry Works For A Poet Is Yourself, And Yet You'll Probably Be The Last One To Know Exactly How You're Serving The Art And How The Art Is Serving You.

The Connections Between People And Land Are Dangerously Oversimplified And Mainly Technological.

The Discussion About Food Doesn't Make Any Sense Without Discussion At The Same Time Of Land, Land Use, Land Policy, Fertility Maintenance, And Farm Infrastructure Maintenance.

Corn And Bean People, I'm Afraid, Have Extremely Specialized Minds.

To Have Good Farming Or Good Land Use Of Any Kind, You Have Got To Have Limits. Capitalism Doesn't Acknowledge Limits.

American Agriculture Is Badly In Need Of Diversity. Another Threat To The Food System Of Course Is The Likelihood That Petroleum Is Not Going To Get Any Cheaper.

People Talk About "job Creation," As If That Had Ever Been The Aim The Industrial Economy. The Aim Was To Replace People With Machines.

When You Take Away The Subsistence Economy, Then Your Farm Population Is Seriously Exposed To The Vagaries Of The Larger Economy. As It Used To Be, The Subsistence Economy Carried People Through The Hard Times, And What You Might Call The Housewife's Economy Of Cream And Eggs Often Held These Farms And Their Families Together.

There Are Lots Of Bad Things That Can Happen To A Food Economy That's Both Extensive And Centralized. There's No Substitute For Petroleum. To Have A Growth Economy Based On A Declining Fuel Supply Is Bound To Be Stressful.