Just finished another incredible book by Wendell Berry... quotes abound!!! Read it!


The Unsettling of America

p. 22 “The so-called professions survive by endlessly ‘processing’ and talking about problems that they have neither the will nor the competence to solve. The doctor who is interested in disease but not in health is clearly in the same category with the conservationist who invests in the destruction of what he otherwise intends to preserve. They both have the comfort of ‘job security,’ but at the cost of ultimate futility.”

p. 28 “The typical present-day conservationist will fight to preserve what he enjoys; he will fight whatever directly threatens his health; he will oppose any ecological violence large or dramatic enough to attract his attention. But he has not yet worried much about the impact of his own livelihood, habits, pleasures, or appetites. He has not, in short, addressed himself to the problem of use. He does not have a definition of his relationship to the world that is sufficiently elaborate and exact.”

p. 32 “The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitable exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.”

p. 41 “And it is one of the miracles of science and hygiene that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.”

p. 47 “The definitive relationships in the universe are thus not competitive but interdependent. And from a human point of view they are analogical. We can build one system only within another. We can have agriculture only within nature, and culture only within agriculture. At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another.”

p. 48 “And it is within unity that we see the hideousness and destructiveness of the
fragmentary-the kind of mind, for example, that can introduce a production machine to increase ‘efficiency’ without troubling about its effect on workers, on the product, and on consumers; that can accept and even applaud the ‘obsolescence’ of the small farm and not hesitate over the possible political and cultural effects; that can recommend continuous tillage of huge monocultures, with massive use of chemicals and no animal manure or humus and worry not at all about the deterioration or loss of soil For cultural patterns of responsible cooperation we have substituted this moral ignorance, which is the etiquette of agricultural ‘progress.’

p. 52 “With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world’s goods and converts them in to garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which we have found a use.”

p. 58 “It is a s if the future is a newly discovered continent which the corporations are colonizing. They have made ‘redskins’ of our descendants, holding them subject to alien values, while their land is plundered of anything that can be shipped home and sold.”

p. 62 “The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

p. 79 “If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.”

p. 108 “For many of the churchly, the life of the spirit is reduced to a dull preoccupation with getting to Heaven. At best, the world is no more than an embarrassment and a trial to the spirit, which is otherwise radically separated from it. The true lover of God must not be burdened with any care or respect for His works, WHile the body goes about its business of destroying the earth, the soul is supposed to lie back and wait for Sunday, keeping itself free of earthy contaminants. While the body exploits other bodies, the soul stands aloof, free from sin, crying to the gawking bystanders: ‘I am not enjoying it!’ As far as this sort of ‘religion’ is concerned, the body is no more than the lusterless container of the soul, a mere ‘package,’ that will nevertheless light up in eternity, forever cool and shiny as a neon cross. This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geologic fault. And this rift in the mentality of religion continues to characterize the modern mind, no matter how secular or worldly it becomes.”

p. 109 “The Bible’s aim, as I read it, is not the freeing of the spirit from the world. It is the handbook of their interaction. It says that they cannot be divided; that their mutuality, their unity, is inescapable; that they are not reconciled in division, but in harmony.”

p. 112 “And like the crisis of identity, the crisis of the body brings a helpless dependence on cures. One spends one’s life dressing and ‘making up’ to compensate for one’s supposed deficiencies. Again, the cure preserves the disease. And the putative healer is the guru of style and beauty aid. The sufferer is by definition a customer.”

p. 132 “Marriage and the care of the earth are each other’s disciplines. Each makes possible the enactment of fidelity toward the other. As the household has become increasingly generalized as a function of the economy and, as a consequence, has become increasingly ‘mobile’ and temporary, these vital connections have been weakened and finally broken. And whatever has been thus disconnected has become ground of exploitation for some breed of salesman, specialist, or expert.”

p. 188 “For the true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land. And we are talking here about seriously damaged but potentially useful land, where American agriculture has so far failed.”

p. 204 “There is no point in saying that perfection of health, as of all else, is not attainable by humans. The point is that we must have the vision of perfection, we must strive for it, we must sense the possibility of approaching it, or we cannot live. Jesus enjoined his followers to be perfect-not, I think, because they could hope for perfection, but because perfection is the necessary standard.”

p. 218 “I do not believe in the efficacy of big solutions. I believe that they not only tend to prolong and complicated the problems they are meant to solve, but that ey cause new problems. On the other hand, if the solution is small, obvious, simple, and cheap, then it may quickly and permanently solve the immediate problem and many others as well.”