A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that technology without a strong ethical or cultural foundation can lead to harmful consequences.
Wendell Berry warns that a person who wields technology without the guidance of a rich cultural and ethical framework poses a danger to society. He implies that mere possession of machine or technology does not guarantee progress or positive outcomes; rather, it is the interplay between technology and the values of the human experience that determines its impact.
In practice
In a discussion about responsible innovation, one could use this quote to emphasize the importance of ethical considerations.
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.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
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 can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
To destroy guide-boards that point in the wrong direction . . . to drive the fiend of fear from the mind . . . is the task of the Freethinker.
It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.
Though thousand times a thousand in battle one may conquer, yet should one conquer just oneself, one is the greatest conqueror.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
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