In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.

The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.

The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.

We have become blind to the alternatives to violence.

A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.