# What Are People For?

- Author: [Wendell Berry](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry.md)
- Quotes: 14
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for

## Quotes

> Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/much-protest-is-naive.md)

> What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/what-we-do-need.md)

> Poetry can be written only because it has been written.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/poetry-can-be-written.md)

> The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/the-teachers-are.md)

> The ecological teaching of the Bible is simply inescapable: God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/the-ecological-teaching.md)

> Eating is an agricultural act.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/eating-is-an-agricultural.md)

> Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/rats-and-roaches.md)

> Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/novelty-is-a-new.md)

> A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/a-teachers-major.md)

> Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/professional-standards-the.md)

> We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/we-are-living-in.md)

> We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/we-are-living.md)

> An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/an-art-that.md)

> The more local and settled a culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert … a man with a machine and inadequate culture … is a pestilence. He shakes more than he can hold.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wendell-berry/what-are-people-for/the-more-local.md)