As long as there are some people who wish to believe… that they are too good to do their own work and clean up after themselves, then somebody else is going to have to do the work and the cleaning up.… If some people grow rich by making things to throw away, then many other people will have to empty the garbage cans and make the trip to the dump.

About Wendell Berry

Wendell Erdman Berry (August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land (1981) and The Unsettling of America...

More quotations from Wendell Berry

Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

—Wendell Berry

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. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing "America the Beautiful" as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.

—Wendell Berry

This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it all back together again. What you do is the only thing that you can do: you take two things that ought to be together and you put them back together. Two things, not all things! That's the way the work has to go. You make connections in your work… That's what we do, we people who make things. If it's a stool or a film or a poem or an essay or a novel or a musical composition, it's all about that. Finding how it fits together and fitting it together.

—Wendell Berry

The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

—Wendell Berry

How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry—between, say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is accepted as a "trade-off.

—Wendell Berry

war destruction environmentalism capitalism industry

History

1 Jan 2016 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

As long as there are some people who wish to believe . . . that they are too good to do their own work and clean up after themselves, then somebody else is going to have to do the work and the cleaning up. . . . If some people grow rich by making things to throw away, then many other people will have to empty the garbage cans and make the trip to the dump.