Wendell Berry Quotes

A good two years after Hurricane Katrina I remember feeling so devastated and so ignorant that there was so much damage still left. I felt like here I was an American and this is an American city and the government hasn't done enough and people haven't given back enough. Everyone forgot and the city was lying in waste.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

There is another world out there, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize. And so the cancer of poverty will continue to grow.

…aspiration for justice often finds itself the captive of ideologies which hide or pervert its meaning …

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin.

What we were all always saying with 'The Wire' was that there's a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they'd get rid of them. They are Americans - they're worth saving; they're worth helping.

We rarely know what motivates somebody in their work, and it's usually a particular moment in their life. For me, that moment is my brother's incarceration and the ways in which this country has decided to neglect, abuse, and sometimes torture people with severe mental illness, especially if they're black.

Sometimes things need to get really bad before they can ever get better. Really bad can become untenable if enough people get sick of it. That was a big thing about why I ended up taking part in that rally [against police brutality] and ended up voicing my opinion and declaring what side I was standing on.

There is a fundamental flaw in interpretations of sharia that say a woman or man should be punished for sex outside of marriage.

What's to become of the morally sound? Left out in the cold, I suppose. We must heal the sick.

No society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell. Shouldn't that tell us something?

To a world sick with racism, get well soon.

We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.

Harriet Tubman didn't have strategy meetings or a movement behind her, she was the movement, she was inspired by being sick and tired of the injustice she was experiencing and she knew she had a right to liberty or death, one or the other she was going to have by any means necessary.

Whether you have a Ph.D., or no D, we're in this bag together. And whether you're from Morehouse or Nohouse, we're still in this bag together. Not to fight to try to liberate ourselves from the men - this is another trick to get us fighting among ourselves - but to work together with the black man, then we will have a better chance to just act as human beings, and to be treated as human beings in our sick society.

Muslims, scholars or not, are on the side of the oppressed and never on the side of the oppressors. Some scholars claim they don't do politics but if you listen to their statements in the Middle East or in other conferences, they support corrupt regimes and despots, such as as-Sissi.

Man marks the earth with ruin - his control stops with the shore.

I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.

In 2012 President Obama didn't go anywhere near African-American communities. Why? Because unemployment was so high there, he didn't want to address it.

His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.