Quotes

The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it’s the next step of peace that we need to create.

Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.

Ecofeminism is a good term for distinguishing a feminism that is ecological from the kind of feminisms that have become extremely technocratic. I would even call them very patriarchal.

In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She’s the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim, you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do, you will sink and drown. Instead, you relax and float.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

Institutions create needs. If you are in an institution, the more they can get you to need them, the more effectively they can control you.

Professionalism is a powerful lever for the monopolization of power. The bureaucratic structure of credentialing is an effective instrument for inducing professional consciousness.

People who need people are threatened by people who don't. The idea of 'I need you' is an invitation to control, manipulation, and abuse.

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

We are the custodians of life on Earth, and we have an obligation to all living things to protect and preserve them.

We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.

We must not wait for someone else to solve our problems. We must take responsibility for our own lives and the future of our planet.

The laws of nature are not something we can negotiate or compromise on. They are the rules that govern all life.

I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws.

All research scientists know that writing in the passive voice is artificial; they are not disembodied observers, but people doing research.

To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.

The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

I teach self-reliance, the world’s most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.

Permaculture creates a cultivated ecology, which is designed to produce more human and animal food than is generally found in nature.

We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to the temple to give thanks to the monk.

Economy without ecology means managing the human nature relationship without knowing the delicate balance between humankind and the natural world.

Human happiness, true prosperity and joyful living can only emerge from a life of elegant simplicity, embedded in the arts and crafts.

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars.

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

The final principle of natural farming is NO PESTICIDES. Nature is in perfect balance when left alone.

Left alone, the earth maintains its own fertility, in accordance with the orderly cycle of plant and animal life.

The greening of the desert means sowing seeds in people’s hearts and creating a green paradise of peace on earth.

We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris.

I wonder if every animal is a spirit... What if they are all spirits sent to you and how you treat them is what you are.

A case could be made, in fact, that the English were the first victims of the British empire: without their conquest, that empire could not have been built.

I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.

Those of us who have been privileged to receive education, skills, and experiences and even power must be role models for the next generation of leadership.

Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven’t done a thing. You are just talking.

You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.

We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk!

We protect nature not for nature’s sake but for our own sake because it’s the infrastructure of our communities...

We need election reform because our elections are being stolen. And these huge powerful voting machine vending companies have privatized the election process in our country.

We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds. We’re protecting it for our own sake...

The journalists in America are no longer covering critical stories. Investigative journalism is gone. Foreign-news coverage is gone. The press is owned by five giant corporations.

Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.

Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.

What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.

Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.

The first duty of the agriculturalist must always be to understand that he is a part of Nature and cannot escape from his environment. He must therefore obey Nature’s rules.

All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration.

The appearance of a pest should be regarded as a warning from Mother Earth to put our house in order.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.

Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told.

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 come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Making sure you drink enough pure water is one of the most important and powerful steps you can take for good health.

In 2016 a Johns Hopkins study found that more than 250,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors, effectively making modern medicine the third leading cause of death in the US.

The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.

Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential.

Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.