Wendell Berry Quotes

What seems impossible today, may half a century hence have become commonplace.

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

The most powerful thing in the world is an idea.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

The world that has made us can no longer contain us

The local church is the hope of the world.

The first step toward changing the world is to change our vision of the world and of our place in it.

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

Since the world has changed so much, the same values don't lead to the same choices anymore.

Our ideology is intolerant...and peremptorily demands...the complete transformation of public life to its ideas.

For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.

I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.

The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has-even if we don't quite know it yet.

I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things.

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.

The world needs change, change needs an activity. It has to be planted by a thought.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.

There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.

It's impossible for anyone to meet the expectation of being the savior of the world.

You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.

Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.