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.

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

In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.

—Wendell Berry

Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other.

—Wendell Berry

Be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.

—Wendell Berry

facts joy

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.

—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

More quotations tagged with “capitalism”

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second lieutenant to major general. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.…

—Smedley Butler

capitalism business

When we truly discover love, capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.

—Will O'Brien

love capitalism Marxism control

The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.

—C. Wright Mills

work fate capitalism

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it is highly unprofitable to most people.

—E. B. White

equality capitalism

Getting a living under capitalism… is so precarious, so uncertain, fraught with such pain and struggle that the wonder is not that so many people become vicious and criminal, but that so many remain in docile submission to such a tyrannous and debasing condition.

—Eugene V. Debs

wonder fear money pain crime doubt capitalism struggle submission

History

23 Nov 2014 Added
26 Oct 2026 Wording changed

Previous wording

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.