Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Wendell Berry

Quote by Wendell Berry

“The tendency to deal with individual citizens exclusively in terms of the abstractions of their class or condition is to strike at the very foundation of American liberty, which was established to safeguard the possibility and the right of escape from such abstractions—the right to become exceptional.”

Quote by Wendell Berry

Book:The Long-Legged House
Create image

Work

The Long-Legged House

This book is a work of speculative fiction that explores a unique and imaginative setting, where a house with extraordinary features plays a central role in the narrative. The story unfolds in a world that is both familiar and alien, as readers are introduced to the enigmatic house and its journey through an ever-changing landscape. more

Author

Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry, an American novelist born on August 5, 1934, is renowned for his profound descriptions of rural life and his critical views on modern industrial civilization. more

You May Also Like

“It was built as a prototype to prove to the rich that this was a bunker that could work. If you were careful enough, if you were rich enough, you could buy something just like this and sit in it to comfortably watch the world around you stutter to a stop as it ran out of everything you had bought up just before the end. And it wasn't the end of everything. Only the end of the things they coveted: money power and comfort. P 49”

EnvironmentClass WarfarePost Apocalyptic
Book:We Speak Through the Mountain
Create image

“8 April 1891 The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant's quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth. This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, 'String up the aristos!' just as they shout 'Down with the army!' or 'Death to the Jews!”

ArmyViolentSensualServantBeastGossipDecadenceFrench RevolutionJewsClass WarfareMisanthropyObscenityBasenessDecadentMurderousLewdBase Instincts
Book:Monsieur de Phocas
Create image

“Nor did she understand the attitude of the armed forces, most of whom came from the middle and working class and had traditionally been closer to the left than to the far right. She did not understand the state of civil war, nor did she realize that war is the soldiers’ work of art, the culmination of all their training, the gold medal of their profession. Soldiers are not made to shine in times of peace. The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts.”

MilitaryObedienceSoldiersClass StruggleClass WarfareClass Traitor
Book:The House of the Spirits
Create image

“[Historian] Kevin Starr has written that "the San Diego free speech battles revealed the depths of reaction possible in the threatened middle- and lower-middle classes of California." He argues that vigilantes were recruited from an anxious petty bourgeoisie, "who were uncertain and insecure in what they had gained or thought they had gained by coming to California." As in late Weimar Germany, "the oligarchy, which is to say, the upper-middle and upper classes, loathed and feared the [Industrial Workers of the World]; but oligarchs did not take to the streets as vigilantes. They did, however, encourage the lower-middle classes to do such work.”

Class WarfareLabor Activism
Author:Justin Akers Chacón
Create image