“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
“We must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies' children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.”
— Wendell Berry
“Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.”
— Wendell Berry
“If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.”
— Wendell Berry
“We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.”
— Wendell Berry
“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
“If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant.”
— Wendell Berry
“Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.”
— Wendell Berry
“The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.”
— Wendell Berry
“It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong.”
— Wendell Berry
“One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.”
— Wendell Berry
“The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.”
— Wendell Berry
“In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.”
— Wendell Berry
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.”
— Wendell Berry