Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
-- Wendell Berry
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
-- Wendell Berry
What I stand for is what I stand on.
-- Wendell Berry
The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare -- warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
-- Wendell Berry
We [the United States] honor greed and waste with the name of economy. We allow ever greater wealth and power to accumulate in the hands of a privileged few only to provide jobs for working people and charity to the poor. And we sanctify all this as Christian, though the Gospels support none of it by so much as a line or a word.
-- Wendell Berry
War depresses public dialogue and debate, it enlarges executive power, diminishes citizens' rights, encourages governmental secrecy and deception, and deforms the outlines of human decency...Thus a government making war for the sake of peace, freedom and human dignity -- as it will never cease to declare -- will curtail the rights of prisoners, resort to torture, deny its errors, exaggerate its virtues, demonize the enemy, and, as is inevitable in modern war, kill many innocent people, including, of course, many children.
-- Wendell Berry
...And we should never forget that it is easy for older people, doing their solemn duty, in the dignity and comfort of high office, to send young soldiers into combat. Nor should we forget, that the war industries never offer, and they are never asked to sacrifice, any fraction of their profits to further a cause to which others are expected to sacrifice their lives.
-- Wendell Berry
As we now have it, the industrial economy operates as if like an army in battle it is in a perpetual state of emergency, requiring violence as the first resort, and the sacrifice of precious, irreplaceable things.
-- Wendell Berry
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