# Quote — Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers

> People who live at the lower ends of watersheds cannot be isolationists — or not for long. Pretty soon they will notice that water flows, and that will set them to thinking about the people upstream who either do or do not send down their silt and pollutants and garbage. Thinking about the people upstream out to cause further thinking about the people downstream. Such pondering on the facts of gravity and the fluidity of water shows us that the golden rule speaks to a condition of absolute interdependency and obligation. People who live on rivers — or, in fact, anywhere in a watershed — might rephrase the rule in this way: Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

- 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#Watershed_and_Commonwealth) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/citizenship-papers/people-who-live

## 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)