We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.

To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.

But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.