Wendell Berry Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• Without a complex knowledge of one's place and without the faithfulness to one's place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. Without such knowledge and faithfulness, moreover, the culture of a country will be superficial and decorative, functional only insofar as it may be a symbol of prestige, the affectation of an elite or "in" group.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, May, Groups

  Wendell Berry (2012). “A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural”, p.66, Counterpoint Press

• The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

  Wendell Berry

  Book, Writing, Culture

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth”, p.152, Counterpoint Press

• For complex reasons, our culture allows "economy" to mean only "money economy." It equates success and even goodness with monetary profit because it lacks any other standard of measurement. I am no economist, but I venture to suggest that one of the laws of such an economy is that a farmer is worth more dead than alive. A second law is that anything diseased is more profitable than anything that is healthy. What is wrong with us contributes more to the "gross national product" than what is right with us.

  Wendell Berry

  Success, Mean, Law

• A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Culture, Machines

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.8, Counterpoint Press

• The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

  Wendell Berry

  Mean, Thinking, Together

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.26, Counterpoint

• We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Ocean, Lakes

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

• The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.

  Wendell Berry

  Character, Culture, Answers

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.198, Counterpoint Press

• If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)

  Wendell Berry

  Yield, People, Generosity

• The two ideas, justice and vocation, are inseparable.... It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that "to work is to pray." (pg. 258, The Idea of a Local Economy)

  Wendell Berry

  Practice, Ideas, Two

• As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.

  Wendell Berry

  Technology, People, Political

  Wendell Berry (2011). “Standing by Words”, p.58, Counterpoint Press

• The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert... a man with a machine and inadequate culture... is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

  Wendell Berry

  Men, Pestilence, Damage

  "What Are People For?". Book by Wendell Berry, 1990.

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