The Art of Loading Brush Quotes

“of all bad motives none may be worse or more hopeless than fear. Nobody, I think, has ever done good work because of fear. Good work is done by knowing how and by love. Love requires faith, courage, patience, and steadiness, none of which can come from fear.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“The faith that limitless technological progress will finally solve the problems of limitless contamination seems to depend upon some sort of neo-religion.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“The old complex life, at once economic and social, was fairly coherent and self-sustaining because each community was focused upon its own local countryside and upon its own people, their needs, and their work. That life is now almost entirely gone. It has been replaced by the dispersed lives of dispersed individuals, commuting and consuming, scattering in every direction every morning, returning at night only to their screens and carryout meals.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“Teaching as a purpose, as such, is difficult to prescribe or talk about because the thing it is proposing to make is usually something so vague as “understanding.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“But good farming is first and last an art, a way of doing and making that involves human histories, cultures, minds, hearts, and souls. It is not the application by dullards of methods and technologies under the direction of a corporate-academic intelligentsia.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“It appears to be widely assumed by politicians, executives, academics, public intellectuals, industrial economists, and the like that they have a competent understanding of agriculture because their grandparents were farmers, or they have met some farmers, or they worked on a farm when they were young. But they invoke their understanding, which they do not have, only to excuse themselves from actual thought about actual issues of agriculture. These people have found “inevitability” a sufficient explanation for the deplorable history of industrial agriculture. They see the reason for the present discontent of “blue collar” voters as low or “stagnant” wages. They don’t see, in back of that, the dispossession that made many of them wage-workers in the first place. The loss everywhere of small farms and small towns and the respectable livelihoods that they provided was ruled “inevitable” and thus easily explained and forgotten.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“It is wrong, I think, to deal with the past as if it can be simply departed from or “solved,” or brought to “closure.” It is discouraging to see the conservatives treat history as one of the “humanities” that can be dispensed with or ignored by hardheaded realists. It is both discouraging and amusing to be assured by the liberals that the past can be risen above by superior persons who, if they had been Thomas Jefferson, would have owned no slaves.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings

“As I look back over my work of several decades, I can see that the back-and-forth of my thoughts has hardly been graceful, as it is hardly graceful in these present pages. It will probably have to be seen as a struggle to find or recover the language necessary to speak, in the same breath, of work and love.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings