# Quote — Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers

> 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.

- Author: [Wendell Berry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry.md)
- Book: [Citizenship Papers](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/citizenship-papers.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry#The_Failure_of_War) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/citizenship-papers/it-is-useless

## More from this book

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/citizenship-papers/a-corporation-essentially.md)

> In a modern war, fought with modern weapons and on the modern scale, neither side can limit to “the enemy” the damage that it does. These wars damage the world. We know enough by now to know that you cannot damage a part of the world without damaging all of it. Modern war has not only made it impossible to kill “combatants” without killing “noncombatants,” it has made it impossible to damage your enemy without damaging yourself.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/citizenship-papers/in-a-modern.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/citizenship-papers/what-could-be-more.md)