Latest Wendell Berry Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.

  Wendell Berry

  Matter, Socialism, Economy

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I would consider myself simply a critic of the market economy. My standard isn't primarily political. First of all, it's ecological. And then I get to matters that are social and cultural.

  Wendell Berry

  Political, Matter, Firsts

  Source: www.neh.gov

• You're making the grant of affection, forbearance, mercy, out of your own experience and, of course, out of cultural tradition. You're saying, to use the well-worn analogy, if I love my children, that puts me under obligation to assume that other people love theirs.

  Wendell Berry

  Children, People, Analogies

  Source: www.neh.gov

• It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, Reason, Figures

  Source: www.neh.gov

• The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.

  Wendell Berry

  Heart, Law, People

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I believe in thrift as I believe in freedom, but I don't support the plutocratic hostility to taxation, regulation, and protections of land, water, and air.

  Wendell Berry

  Believe, Land, Air

  Source: www.neh.gov

• We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Military, Differences

  Source: www.neh.gov

• When you have large-scale legitimated violence in a place that is divided as profoundly and bitterly as Kentucky was, the legitimate violence can cause illegitimate violence, a terrible local heartlessness and cruelty that feeds on itself and goes on and on.

  Wendell Berry

  Kentucky, Violence, Causes

  Source: www.neh.gov

• It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

  Wendell Berry

  Writing, Historical, Fiction

  Source: www.neh.gov

• Analogies have tied things together for me, personally. The fundamental one for me is the analogy between your relationship to your spouse and your relationship to your place. Both need to be a settled commitment and both involve continuous learning and adjusting.

  Wendell Berry

  Commitment, Together, Needs

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.

  Wendell Berry

  Tree, Shapes, Way

  Source: www.neh.gov

• I hear from readers a good deal, and I try to answer every letter. I think, because of my commitment to issues of conservation and good agriculture and peaceableness, they find something hopeful in my work.

  Wendell Berry

  Commitment, Thinking, Agriculture

  Source: www.neh.gov

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

  Wendell Berry

  People, Community, Needs

• If you're a writer and you are at all inclined to speak as a Christian in some way, you realize very quickly that the conventional language is pretty much useless. It takes a long time to get past that, or it has taken me a long time. People in conventional Christianity have spoken lightly and sometimes frivolously of God for a long time. It's a word that needs to be used sparingly, in my opinion.

  Wendell Berry

  Christian, Taken, Past

• People are always talking about the first church. The real first church was that gaggle of people who followed Jesus around. We don't know anything about them. But he apparently didn't ask them what creed they subscribed to, or what their sexual preference was, or any of that. He fed them. He healed them. He forgave them. He is clear about sin, but he was also for forgiveness.

  Wendell Berry

  Jesus, Real, Talking

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Thinking, People, Scratches

  Wendell Berry, Morris Allen Grubbs (2007). “Conversations with Wendell Berry”, p.172, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.

  Wendell Berry

  Practice, Let It Go, Matter

  Wendell Berry, Morris Allen Grubbs (2007). “Conversations with Wendell Berry”, p.172, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.

  Wendell Berry

  Jobs, People, Entrepreneur

• Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.

  Wendell Berry

  Depressing, People, Levels

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Agriculture, Diversity, Needs

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Growth, Fuel, Economy

  Wendell Berry, Morris Allen Grubbs (2007). “Conversations with Wendell Berry”, p.167, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Hard Times, Eggs, People

• The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.

  Wendell Berry

  Agriculture, Principles, Genius

  "Wendell E. Berry Interview". Interview with Jim Leach, www.neh.gov. 2012.

• Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.

  Wendell Berry

  Schedules, Want, Unexpected

  Interview with Jim Leach, www.neh.gov. May/June 2012.

• People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.

  Wendell Berry

  Jobs, People, Machines

  "Nature as an Ally: An Interview with Wendell Berry". Interview with Sarah Leonard, www.dissentmagazine.org. Spring 2012.