But there is another form that life can take. We can learn about it from exceptional people of our own culture, and from other cultures less destructive than ours. I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children; whose work serves the earth he lives on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until “retirement,” but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of his place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains him, and which he knows he can never encompass with his understanding or desire.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, ch. 2 “The One-Inch Journey” (1971)
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In the quotation above is embedded "the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children," which appears to be the modern origin of a wide array of quotations to that effect.
The chapter was reprinted as "The One-Inch Journey" in Audubon magazine (1971-05).
The basic phrase and variants first achieved popularity in the early 1970s, showing up in a variety of forms (and often attributed to J. J. Audubon himself). Among those variants:Those variants, and more discussion about the origins of this quotation, can be found at: Quote Origin: We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It from Our Children – Quote Investigator®.
- We have not inherited the land from our fathers, we have borrowed it from our children.
- We have not inherited the earth from our fathers and are hence entitled to use it according to our wishes. We have rather borrowed it from our children ...
- The world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.
- We don’t inherit the earth from our fathers, we borrow it from our children.
- We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.
- We have not inherited the earth from our parents, we have borrowed it from our children.
- We have not inherited the land from our parents, we are borrowing it from our children.
- We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
- We did not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrowed it from our descendants.
- We did not inherit our future from our ancestors, we have borrowed it from our children..
Note that in the 1991 edition, the passage in question is omitted in the re-edit:But there is another form that life can take. We can learn about it from exceptional people of our own culture, and from other cultures less destructive than ours. I am speaking of the lives of people who have undertaken to cherish the world and do it no damage, not because they are duty-bound, but because they love the world and love their children; whose work serves the earth they live on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until “retirement,” but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never encompass with their understanding or desire.
Quotations by:
Berry, Wendell
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only hope.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, ch. 1 (1977)
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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Endorsement blurb for Charles E. Little, The Dying of the Trees (1997)
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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.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1968), “The Loss of the Future,” Religious Humanism Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 47
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Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1970-01-01), “Compromise, Hell!” Orion Magazine
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There is, thank God, no teacher-meter, and there is never going to be one. A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1985), “Wallace Stegner and the Great Community,” What Are People For? (1990)
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Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1988), “Economy and Pleasure,” What Are People For? (1990)
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It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1988), “Economy and Pleasure,” What Are People For? (1990)
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The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1988), “God and Country,” What Are People For? (1990)
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We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1990), “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” What Are People For? (1990)
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Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1990), “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” What Are People For? (1990)
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The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.
People who live at the lower ends of watersheds cannot be isolationists — or not for long. Pretty soon they will notice that water flows, and that will set them to thinking about the people upstream who either do or do not send down their silt and pollutants and garbage. Thinking about the people upstream out to cause further thinking about the people downstream. Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers — or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed — might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1997), “Watershed and Commonwealth,” Citizenship Papers (2003)
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See Matthew 7:12.
What could be more absurd, to begin with, than our attitude of high moral outrage against other nations for manufacturing the selfsame weapons that we manufacture? The difference, as our leaders say, is that we will use these weapons virtuously, whereas our enemies will use them maliciously — a proposition that too readily conforms to a proposition of much less dignity: we will use them in our interest, whereas our enemies will use them in theirs.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1999), “The Failure of War,” Citizenship Papers (2003)
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If you know even as little history as I do, it is hard not to doubt the efficacy of modern war as a solution to any problem except that of retribution — the “justice” of exchanging one damage for another.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1999), “The Failure of War,” Citizenship Papers (2003)
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Violence breeds violence. Acts of violence committed in “justice” or in affirmation of “rights” or in defense of “peace” do not end violence. They prepare and justify its continuation.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1999), “The Failure of War,” Citizenship Papers (2003)
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The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2000), “The Total Economy,” Citizenship Papers (2003)
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The National Security Strategy defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents” (p. 5). This is truly a distinct kind of violence, but to imply by the word “terrorism” that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of “terrorists” is misleading. The “legitimate” warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. The distinction between the intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in “terrorism,” and the willingness to do so, as in “war,” is not a source of comfort.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 1, paid advertisment, New York Times
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The essay, including this passage, was also published in a longer form in Orion Magazine (2003-03/04), and collected in his Citizenship Papers (2003). In the latter, the second sentence is extended:This is truly a distinct kind of violence, but it is a kind old and familiar, even in the United States. All that was really new about the events of September 11, 2001, was that they raised the scale of such violence to that of "legitimate" modern warfare. To imply ...
It is impossible to think that constitutional government can be suspended in a time of danger, in deference to the greater “efficiency” of centralized power, and then easily or quickly restored. Efficiency may be a political virtue, but only if strictly limited. Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 3, Citizenship Papers (2003)
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This passage did not appear in the original (abridged) full-page ad in the New York Times (2003-02-06) or the Orion Magazine (2003-03/04) publication of the essay.
And now we are stirring up the question whether or not Islam is a warlike religion, ignoring the question, much more urgent for us, whether or not Christianity is a warlike religion. There is no hope in this. Islam, Judaism, Christianity — all have been warlike religions. All have tried to make peace and rid the world of evil by fighting wars. This has not worked. It is never going to work. The failure belongs inescapably to all of these religions insofar as they have been warlike, and to acknowledge this failure is the duty of all of them. It is the duty of all of them to see that it is wrong to destroy the world, or risk destroying it, to get rid of its evil.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 4, Citizenship Papers (2003)
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This passage did not appear in the original (abridged) full-page ad in the New York Times (2003-02-06) or the Orion Magazine (2003-03/04) publication of the essay.
In nuclear or biological warfare, in which we know we cannot limit effects, how do we distinguish our enemies from our friends — or our enemies from ourselves? Does this not bring us exactly to the madness of terrorists who kill themselves in order to kill others?
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 4, Citizenship Papers (2003)
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This passage did not appear in the original (abridged) full-page ad in the New York Times (2003-02-06) or the Orion Magazine (2003-03/04) publication of the essay.
Authentic peace is no more passive than war. Like war, it calls for discipline and intelligence and strength of character, though it calls also for higher principles and aims. If we are serious about peace, then we must work for it as ardently, seriously, continuously, carefully, and bravely as we have ever prepared for war.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 4, paid advertisement, New York Times
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The essay, including this passage (its closing words), was also published in a longer form in Orion Magazine (2003-03/04), and collected in Berry's Citizenship Papers (2003).
It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can’t do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies’ children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 4, Citizenship Papers (2003)
(Source)
The essay, including this passage, was also published in a longer form in Orion Magazine (2003-03/04), and collected in his Citizenship Papers (2003).
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Poem (1968-11), “The Peace of Wild Things,” Green River Review, Vol. 1, No. 1
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Collected in his Openings (1968).
Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Poem (1980), “A Warning To My Readers,” A Part, ch. 3
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We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to “win the hearts and minds of the people” by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the “truth” of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. […] All this is made frighteningly clear, in Vietnam, in our inability to control the swiftly widening discrepancy between what we are doing and what we say we are doing.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
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Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
However, I do belong in the fullest sense of the word to a large group that is having a vast and ever-increasing effect on the world. It is known as the human race. I am aware that as a member of that group I am in the worst possible company: communists, fascists and totalitarians of all sorts, militarists and tyrants, exploiters, vandals, gluttons, ignoramuses, murderers, thieves, and liars, men for whose birth the creation is worse off and for whose lives other men will still be suffering a hundred years from now. The price of admission to this group is great, and until death not fully known. The cost of getting out is extreme. I find, therefore, no reasonable alternative to membership. But since I am a member on such exacting terms, I will not allow my involvement with this group to remain accidental, but will give my whole allegiance to it and work for its betterment.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
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Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
We have come to depend obsessively on an enormous capability of violence — for security, for national self-esteem, even for economic stability.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
(Source)
Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
Surely the idea of a “limited war” is one of the most dangerously self-deceiving verbal gimmicks ever invented. For though war makes use of reason, as a weapon, it is not reasonable in nature. Its nature is the nature of pride and anger. It follows the brute logic of violent emotion, which points directly toward the use of the greatest available power.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
(Source)
Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
If I solve my dispute with my neighbor by killing him, I have certainly solved the immediate dispute. If my neighbor was a scoundrel, then the world is no doubt better for his absence. But in killing my neighbor, though he may have been a terrible man who did not deserve to live, I have made myself a killer — and the life of my next neighbor is in greater peril than the life of the last.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
(Source)
Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
Supporters of the war are constantly asking those who oppose it: Why don’t you deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side? The answer, so far as I am concerned, is that I do deplore the wrongs and atrocities committed by the other side. But I am responsible for the wrongs and atrocities committed by our side.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
(Source)
Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).
That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any “political liberties” that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (1994-09-29), “Conserving Forest Communities,” Kentucky Forest Summit, Louisville
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Collected in Another Turn of the Crank (1995).
Violence, in short, is the norm of our economic life and our national security. The line that connects the bombing of a civilian population to the mountain “removed” by strip mining to the gullied and poisoned field to the clear-cut watershed to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (2005-05-14), Commencement, Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky
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This was either excerpted from, or included in, his undated essay "Letter to Daniel Kemmis," collected in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, Part 2 (2005).
We are living, it seems, into the culmination of a long warfare — at first merely commercial and then industrial, always unabashedly violent — against human beings and other creatures, and of course against the earth itself. The purpose of this warfare has been to render the real goods of the world into various forms of abstract wealth: money, gold, shares, etc.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (2005-05-14), Commencement, Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky
(Source)
This was either excerpted from, or included in, his undated essay "Letter to Daniel Kemmis," collected in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, Part 2 (2005).
We make war, we are told, for the love of peace. We subvert our Bill of Rights and impose our will abroad for the sake of freedom and the rule of law. We honor greed and waste with the name of economy. We allow ever greater wealth and power to accumulate in the hands of a privileged few only to provide jobs for working people and charity to the poor. And we sanctify all this as Christian, though the Gospels support none of it by so much as a line or a word.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (2005-05-14), Commencement, Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky
(Source)
This was either excerpted from, or included in, his undated essay "Letter to Daniel Kemmis," collected in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, Part 2 (2005).
We know that war depresses public dialogue and debate, enlarges executive power, diminishes citizens’ rights, encourages governmental secrecy and deception, and deforms the outlines of human decency. Thus a government making war for the sake of peace, freedom, and human dignity — as it will never cease to declare — will curtail the rights of prisoners, resort to torture, deny its errors, exaggerate its virtues, demonize the enemy, and (as is inevitable in modern war) kill many innocent people, including, of course, many children.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Speech (2005-05-14), Commencement, Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky
(Source)
This was either excerpted from, or included in, his undated essay "Letter to Daniel Kemmis," collected in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, Part 2 (2005).