Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nobody ever rioted for austerity.
Defending the planet means changing the world.
Those who deny their own feelings tend to deny other people's.
Like other lifeforms, we [humans] exist only to replicate ourselves.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.
I could see the point of Brexit if it meant returning power to the people.
August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad.
Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.
Successful movements also need an organisational model that allows them to keep growing.
Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible.
There are, I believe, three steps to overcoming fear: name it, normalise it, socialise it.
All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.
Technological change is essential, but to a natural historian it often feels cold and distancing.
Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.
Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal.
Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.
Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
The high seas - in other words, the oceans beyond the 200-mile national limits - are a lawless realm.
In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.
The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.
In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits.
Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth's living systems.
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
It doesn't matter how many solar panels you install if you don't simultaneously shut down coal and gas burners.
The Enlightenment ideal, which all universities claim to endorse, is that everyone should think for themselves.
The ideology of consumption is so prevalent that it has become invisible: it is the plastic soup in which we swim.
While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals.
Pedestrians and cyclists are squeezed by planners into narrow and often dangerous spaces - the afterthoughts of urban design.
There is plenty of housing - for the rich. But a series of outrageous policies ensure that it remains inaccessible to the poor.
Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it.
Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.
Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.
Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more.
As SUVs are higher and heavier, they are more likely to kill the people they hit. Driving an SUV in an urban area is an antisocial act.
There is a tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. A lively, meaningful democracy would achieve a balance between the two.
I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?
While some livestock farms are much better than others, there are none in this country that look like natural ecosystems. Nature has no fences.
A large body of literature suggests that wellbeing is intimately linked to attachment - not only to other people, but also to the natural world.
War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything goes with it.
New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.
Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.
We should be cautious about embracing data before it is published in the academic press, and must always avoid treating correlation as causation.
Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.
A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.
When I kayak in Cardigan Bay, in Wales, what I hope to find above all else is dolphins. Sometimes I do, and these days are the waymarks of my life.
Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.