Another Turn of the Crank Quotes

“The promoters of the global economy...see nothing odd or difficult about unlimited economic growth or unlimited consumption in a limited world.”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world. summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

I believe that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the work of the English agriculturist SirAlbert Hovvard, who said, in The Soil and Health, that "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man [is] one great subject."

I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not "against technology" so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.

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.”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

“[T]he whole human population of the world cannot live on imported food. Some people some where are going to have to grow the food. And where ever food is grown the growing of it will raise the same two questions: How do you preserve the land in use? And how do you preserve the people who use the land?

The farther the food is transported, the harder it will be to answer those questions correctly.”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

“Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not consumer's health.")”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

“Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays

“What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)”
― Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Essays