A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the moral compromises individuals make for the sake of corporate profit.
Wendell Berry suggests that corporations are not just business entities; they represent a collective moral compromise where individuals prioritize financial gain over ethical considerations. By selling their allegiance to these institutions, people often abandon their principles and contribute to a culture that values monetary success over moral integrity.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about corporate ethics in a business class.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.
What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to something that already is?
War can only be qualified by its object, and there is neither foreign war nor civil war, there is only just or unjust war.
Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.
To understand the fanatic rejection of women's liberation in the Muslim world, one has to take into account the time factor. Most of us educated women have illiterate mothers. The conservative wave against women in the Muslim world is a defense mechanism against profound changes in both sex roles and the touchy subject of sexual identity.
A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
Someone who can search for something is happy. Searching gives a meaning to life. Nowadays itβs not so easy to find something you might be looking for. The most important thing, however, is the search itself, the way you take. Itβs not so important where it leads. thatβs why my characters are always looking for something, maybe only a cat, a sheep or a wife, but that is at least the beginning of a story.
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