Wendell Berry Quotes About Community

Quotes about: Community

• People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

  Wendell Berry

  Lonely, Hate, Drug Use

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.61, Counterpoint

• A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

  Wendell Berry

  Spiritual, Knowing, People

  Wendell Berry (2012). “The Long-Legged House”, p.71, Counterpoint Press

• The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Age, Care

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.70, Counterpoint

• Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.

  Wendell Berry

  Beautiful, Lying, Believe

  Wendell Berry, Daniel Kemmis, Courtney White (2006). “The Way of Ignorance: And Other Essays”, p.23, Counterpoint Press

• We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.

  Wendell Berry

  Government, Community, Doubt

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.86, Counterpoint

• I believe that the community - in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. (pg. 146, Health is Membership)

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Community, Membership

• The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.

  Wendell Berry

  Mean, Community, Political

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.58, Counterpoint

• The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, Community, Use

• If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared. (pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy")

  Wendell Berry

  Real, Animal, Air

  Wendell Berry (2010). “The Hidden Wound”, p.129, Counterpoint Press

• It is better to buy from a small, privately owned local store than from a chain store. It is better to buy a good product than a bad one. Do not buy anything you don't need. Do as much as you can for yourself. If you cannot do something for yourself, see if you have a neighbor who can do it for you. Do everything you can to see that your money stays as long as possible in the local community.

  Wendell Berry

  Long, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

• A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.

  Wendell Berry

  Mutual Help, Community, Helping

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.144, Counterpoint Press

• The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Affluence

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.59, Counterpoint

• Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.

  Wendell Berry

  Taken, Thinking, Space

• Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Heaven, Soul

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.319, Counterpoint

• A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Environmental, Common

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

• History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings.

  Wendell Berry

  Regret, Community, Forever

• People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities.

  Wendell Berry

  People, Community, Needs

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Real, Community, World

• We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

  Wendell Berry

  Ecosystems, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2001). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint Press

• The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

  Wendell Berry

  Sacrifice, Ecosystems, Community

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

• ... 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

• Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation. In speaking of community, then, we are speaking of a complex connection not only among human beings or between humans and their homeland but also between human economy and nature, between forest or prairie and field or orchard, and between troublesome creatures and pleasant ones. All neighbors are included.

  Wendell Berry

  Land, People, Community

  Wendell Berry (1993). “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays”, Pantheon

• To me, an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.80, Counterpoint Press

• You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared o submit to correction by anybody who cares about a community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community's dying.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Community, Progress

  Wendell Berry (2000). “Jayber Crow: A Novel”, Counterpoint LLC

• A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy. (pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")

  Wendell Berry

  Spiritual, Racism, Community

  Wendell Berry (2010). “The Hidden Wound”, p.135, Counterpoint Press

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