Our Only World Quotes

“People do not become wealthy by treating one another or the world kindly and with respect.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Scared for health, afraid of death, bored, dissatisfied, vengeful, greedy, ignorant, and gullible—these are the qualities of the ideal consumer. Can we imagine a way of education that would turn passive consumers into active and informed critics, capable of using their own minds in their own defense?”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Oversimplified moral certainties—always requiring hostility, always potentially violent—isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Freedom is not simple, for it always is involved with responsibility. The relation between freedom and responsibility is not a “balance” to be expediently adjusted by governments or citizens, who without both can have neither. I have quoted John Milton’s definition of freedom before, and I am going to quote it again, for it is complex and precise enough to have the force of an essential justice: “To be free,” Milton wrote, “is precisely the same thing as to be pious, wise, just, and temperate, careful of one’s own, abstinate from what is another’s and thence, in fine, magnanimous and brave.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians "run". Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor (“jobs,” merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one’s country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“In the Gospels the sinfulness of all humans is assumed. It is neediness that is exceptional, and in Jesus’s ministry need clearly takes a certain precedence over sin. His kindness is best exemplified by his feedings and healings with no imputation at all of deserving. But the wealth of this idea of kindness is not exhausted by kindnesses to humans. It is far more encompassing. From some Christians as far back as the twelfth century, certainly from farther back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world. From the point of view of Genesis 1 or of the 104th Psalm, we would say that all are of one kind, one kinship, one nature, because all are creatures. Much happiness, much joy, can come to us from our membership in a kindness so comprehensive and original. It is a shame, as I know from long acquaintance with myself, to be divided from it by the autoerotic pleasure of despising other members.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking the heat and even the courage of a personal hatred. Categorical hatred is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as at the crucifixion, and before, and since. This sort of violence can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal of kindness to heretics, foreigners, enemies, or any other group different from ourselves.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“The theologian William E. Hull, worrying over the destructive animosities that divide religious organizations, asked, “How can we avoid the wrangling that breeds hostility?” And he answered: “By seeking clarity rather than victory” (Beyond the Barriers, p. 169).”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“we must not speak or think of the land alone or of the people alone, but always and only of both together. If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“On the contrary, so few as just one of us can save energy right now by self-control, careful thought, and remembering the lost virtue of frugality. Spending less, burning less, traveling less may be a relief. A cooler, slower life may make us happier, more present to ourselves, and to others who need us to be present. Because of such rewards, a large problem may be effectively addressed by the many small solutions that, after all, are necessary, no matter what the government might do. The government might even do the right thing at last by imitating the people.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it. Kind is obviously related to kin, but also to race and to nature. In the Middle Ages kind and nature were synonyms. Equal, in the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence, could be well translated by these terms: All men are created kin, or of a kind, or of the same race or nature.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Every community needs to learn how much of the local land is locally owned, and how much is available for local needs and uses.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“From some Christians as far back as the twelfth century, certainly from farther back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world. From the point of view of Genesis I or of the 104th Psalm, we would say that all are of one kind, one kinship, one nature, because all are creatures.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor (“jobs,” merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one’s country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“If we are serious about these big problems, we have got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves. Thus we put an end to our habit of oversimplification. If we want to stop the impoverishment of land and people, we ourselves must be prepared to become poorer. If”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“The solution, many times more complex and difficult, would be to go beyond our ideas, obviously insane, of war as the way to peace and of permanent damage to the ecosphere as the way to wealth.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Categorical hatred is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob overflowing with righteousness, as at the crucifixion, and before, and since.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“There is no good reason for the government to treat homosexuals as a special category of persons.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays