10 Wendell Berry Quotes on Society

Wendell Berry quotes on society

2. 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.

8. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

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

14. We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

33. After World War II, we hoped the world might be united for the sake of peacemaking. Now the world is being 'globalized' for the sake of trade and the so-called free market-for the sake, that is, of plundering the world for cheap labor, cheap energy, and cheap materials. How nations, let alone regions and communities, are to shape and protect themselves within this 'global economy' is far from clear.

36. If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.

41. We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore 'domestic violence' and think that our society can be pacified by 'gun control.' Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

48. We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all- by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians- be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

63. To be sane in a mad time is bad for the brain, worse for the heart.'

65. Let me say and not mourn: the world lives in the death of speech and sings there.