The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.
Interpretation
Our actions today impact future generations, and we must care for the world we leave them.
This quote by Wendell Berry emphasizes the responsibility we have towards future generations. It suggests that the Earth and its resources are not solely ours to exploit; rather, we are custodians of the world for the sake of those who will come after us. By framing the world as something borrowed from our children, Berry urges us to adopt a mindset of stewardship and to make choices that promote sustainability and kindness, ensuring that we leave behind a healthy planet.
In practice
In a speech about climate change, Mayor Smith quoted Wendell Berry to emphasize the importance of protecting our environment for future generations.
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.
If truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.
To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.
I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.
Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.
The right to bear arms? What about the right to live?
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
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