We are killing our world on the theory that it was never alive but is only an accidental concatenation of materials and mechanical processes.

– Wendell Berry in The Way of Ignorance: The Way of Ignorance p.62

If you wish to steal farm products or coal or timber from a rural region, you will find it much less troubling to do so if you believe that the people are too stupid and violent to deserve the things you wish to steal from them.

– Wendell Berry in The Way of Ignorance: Imagination in Place p.49

[W]hen one passes from any abstract order, whether that of the consumer economy or Ransom’s “Statement of Principles” or a brochure from the Extension Service, to the daily life and work of one’s own farm, one passes from a relatively simplicity into a complexity that is irreducible except by disaster and ultimately is incomprehensible. It is the complexity of the life of a place uncompromisingly itself, which is at the same time the life of the world, of all Creation. One meets not only the weather and the wildness of the world, but also the limitations of one’s knowledge, intelligence, character, and bodily strength. To do this, of course, is to accept the place as an influence.

– Wendell Berry in The Way of Ignorance: Imagination in Place p.48