# Quote — Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers

> We cling in our public life to a brutal hypocrisy. In our century of almost universal violence of humans against fellow humans, and against our natural and cultural commonwealth, hypocrisy has been inescapable because our opposition to violence has been selective or merely fashionable. Some of us who approve of our monstrous military budget and our peacekeeping wars nonetheless deplore “domestic violence” and think that our society can be pacified by “gun control.” Some of us are against capital punishment but for abortion. Some of us are against abortion but for capital punishment.

- 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/we-cling-in-our

## 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)