Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays Paperback - 1994

First line

In our relation to the land, we are ruled by a number of terms and limits set not by anyone's preference but by nature and by human nature: I. Land that is used will be ruined unless it is properly cared for.

Media reviews

“Berry once again carves out a unique position in American social debate; not liberal (he hates big government), not libertarian (he would balance individual rights along with those of the commonwealth), but always sharp-tongued and aglow with common sense.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Berry’s words are those of a steward. He is trying to preserve that which is intimate, honest, and good. He is an intense, angry, but always caring critic of American culture. His aim is to install a sense of mission that would cause his readers to begin to build—or rebuild—their local communities.”
—Lexington Herald-Leader
 
“Wendell Berry is among our wisest and most clear-sighted thinkers; one can hardly speak of him without the word ‘prophetic’ coming to mind. Writing with grace and sanity from his Kentucky farmstead, his words contain enough common sense to turn absurdity on its head, and because the truth is both simpler and more subtle than any ideology, to challenge the assumptions of every one of our shallow ideological camps.”
—Caelum et Terra

"Read [him] with pencil in hand, make notes, and hope that somehow our country and the world will soon come to see the truth that is told here."
—The New York Times Book Review

More praise for Wendell Berry:
 
The Gift of Good Land
“Our hope is here. And here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him.”
—The Washington Post Book World
 
Recollected Essays, 1965–1980
“In prose as transparent and healing as a clear mountain lake [Berry] emerges as a prophetic conscience of the nation. An important, humane book.”
—Publishers Weekly
 
“Wendell Berry is a good novelist, a fine poet, and the best essayist now working in America.”
—Edward Abbey
 
“Berry is a rare human being, a man of honesty and grace, a man deeply in love with life. And his essays will endure for the same reason that those of Thoreau and E. B. White and Wallce Stegner endure, because they speak not only to the human heart and mind, but also to the condition of the human spirit . . .”
—Harry Middleton, The Philadelphia Enquirer

What Are People For?
“He is . . . the prophetic voice of our day.”
—Page Smith, The Christian Science Monitor