Wendell Berry Quotes

Our democratic institutions are adversarial.

American democracy is a unique form of government which at the same time requires [political] competition and cooperation.

The president can't succeed without Congress, and Congress can't succeed without the president. The image of one depends on the image of another. It is not a zero-sum game.

On one side the government, the other side the mob.

Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

I expect to fight that proposition until hell freezes over. Then I propose to start fighting on the ice.

No one received them [the coalition forces] with roses. They were received with bombs, shoes and bullets.

Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed.

To make one, there must be two.

We will be victorious, and they will be defeated.

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades

Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it's now impossible if you want to actually get anything done. All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.

To have opposition ? We have it, and you can go and meet with them. We have some of them within the government, we have some of them outside the government. They are opposition. We have it.

Recognize and respect mutual self-interests, then build creative collaborations to serve them.

Whenever there is a conflict between universal principles and self-interest, self-interest is likely to prevail.

You are the world and the world is you.

Beatrice. We should think of our family. But. But we must also think of ourselves.

Peace on this planet will not be forged by military strength. It will be forged by those who come together despite their government's differences.

The American culture ideal of the "self-made-man," of everyone "standing on his own feet" seemed as tragic a picture as the initiative-destroying dependence on a benevolent despot. He felt and perceived clearly that we all need continuous help from each other, and that this type of interdependence is the greatest challenge to maturity of individual and group functioning.

Togetherness, for me, means teamwork. It makes us reflect how completely dependent we are upon one another in our social and commercial life. The more diversified our labors and interests have become in the modern world, the more surely need to integrate our efforts to justify our individual selves and our civilization.

It's very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It's easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.

It is not, perhaps, unreasonable to conclude, that a pure and perfect democracy is a thing not attainable by man, constituted as he is of contending elements of vice and virtue, and ever mainly influenced by the predominant principle of self-interest. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted, that there never was that government called a republic, which was not ultimately ruled by a single will, and, therefore, (however bold may seem the paradox,) virtually and substantially a monarchy.