If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.
But the sower going forth to sow sets foot into time to come, the seeds falling on his own place. He has prepared a way for his life to come to him, if it will. Like a tree, he has given roots to the earth, and stands free.
The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.
It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.
Monsanto doesn’t care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Those who say Islam is a warlike religion must ask if Christianity has been as well.
There is much good work to be done by every one of us and we must begin to do it.
The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.
The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...
The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm.
It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.
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.
We live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand.
The damages of our present agriculture all come from the determination to use the life of the soil as if it were an extractable resource like coal.
When there are enough people on the land to use it but not enough to husband it, then the wildness of the soil that we call fertility begins to diminish, and the soil itself begins to flee from us in water and wind.