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Quotes from The Long-Legged House — Wendell Berry

1934–2026 United States

← All quotes by Wendell Berry

10 quotes

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.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

Wars have never made peace or preserved it or fostered its ideals.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

We haven't accepted — we can't really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

In making myself a killer I have destroyed the possibility of neighborhood.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

The rule, acknowledged or not, seems to be that if we have great power we must use it. We would use a steam shovel to pick up a dime. We have experts who can prove there is no other way to do it.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

When the possessions and households of citizens are no longer honored by the acts, as well as the principles, of their government, then the concentration camp ceases to be one of the possibilities of human nature and becomes one of its likelihoods.

The Long-Legged House (1969)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wendell Berry (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.