Sustainability Quotes

Banks should actively encourage companies that are doing a good job on environmental and social fronts. Banking for community development is the banking of future.

Saurabh Gupta Earth5R

You maybe able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.

Donella H. Meadows

The idea of unlimited growth... needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and... the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied. - E.F. Schumacher

Wayne Ellwood

Nature is inexhaustibly sustainable if we care for it. It is our universal responsibility to pass a healthy earth onto future generations.

Sylvia Dolson

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

Robert Lynd

If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.

Susan Freinkel

People 'over-produce' pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.

Ha-Joon Chang

What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

Andy Couturier

I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.

Andy Couturier

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

Andy Couturier

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies.

Andy Couturier

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

Andy Couturier

Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees.

Andy Couturier

Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

Andy Couturier

My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.

Andy Couturier

I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.

Andy Couturier

I finally understood that I couldn’t avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderfulthing, a beautiful thing.

Andy Couturier

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.

David Mackay

Ban short-selling, high speed trading and all other instruments of pure speculation

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

CEOs should be measured by the value they create into the community, the shareholders and the members of the company.

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

OURSOCIETY ISCONTROLLED BY LAWYERSAND FINANCIERS"PROBLEMMAKERS WE NEED TO EVOMETO A SOCIETY LEAD BYCREATORS, ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS PROBLEMSOLVERS. SURELY WE WILLHAVE MORE INGENUITYCOOPERATION ANDPEACE

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Of course, chaos can lead to failure and extinction. But so can order. Far more nations, people, and ideas die of atrophy than die from revolution. Both order and chaos are necessary ingredients for long run success - for sustainability.

John Ikerd

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation.

Peter Joseph

Markets cannot meet the needs of the very poor. The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Ban privileges. The rules of the game should be the same to all players, regardless of their size, location, or any other criteria

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Another principle that I believe can be justified by scientific evidence so far is that nobody is going to emigrate from this planet not ever....It will be far cheaper, and entail no risk to human life, to explore space with robots. The technology is already well along....the real thrill will be in learning in detail what is out there...It is an especially dangerous delusion if we see emigration into space as a solution to be taken when we have used up this planet....Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings...

Edward O. Wilson

We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

Paul Newman

Feeling at home anywhere on earth, and a foreigner even in the country where I was born, I consider myself an earthling, a citizen of the world.I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity. I have lived through tremendous adventures and survived only because other people risked their lives for me. Realising how interconnected and interdependent we all are, I am neither shy or embarrassed when it is time for me lean on another to ask for help. And when I have the opportunity to help another, I view it as my duty and privilege.

Yossi Ghinsberg

The aquatic environment must be safeguarded by men. God created mankind to care for the environment and all the living resources.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Monoculture is mono for the earth.

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

We're reaching the point where the Earth will have to end the burden we've placed on her, if we don't lift the burden ourselves.

Steven M. Greer

Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.

Terence McKenna

A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.

Gloria Ng

These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.

Mike Bond

When we flood our creative problem-solving mind with the endorphins of gratitude, we are open to receiving the spectacular solutions that are needed now to ensure that generations to come will enjoy this beautiful blue ball that we call home.

Natalie Pace

Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, a dangerous people.

Steven M. Greer

What is the point of "labor saving" if by making work effortless we make it poor, and if by doing poor work we weaken our bodies and lose conviviality and health? (Health is Membership, pg. 93)

Wendell Berry

When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we’re being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don’t have a very good vocabulary to describe what others species do to us, because we think we’re the only species that really does anything.

Michael Pollan

While the word charity connotes a single act of giving, justice speaks to right living, of aligning oneself with the world in a way that sustains rather than exploits the rest of creation.

Rachel Held Evans

Monitor, transparently, and enforce the separation of Democracy powers: Legislative; Executive; Judicial

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

Social entrepreneurship represents the opportunity to redefine the role of government.

Robert Hacker

. . . .how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world--and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction.

Michael Pollan

Sustainability is best illustrated by those who sell food … just so they afford something to eat.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Love foods that sustain and protect you, and love you back.

Bryant McGill

The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

Dan Barber

I'm not one of those academics that don't do shit but reads about it. The difference is, I do shit. I have a proof of concept and it works.

Ron Finley

Until there is a reversal of the sense of values which cares more for size and appearance than for quality, there will be no solving the problem of food pollution.

Masanobu Fukuoka

If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you're willing to wait long enough.

Catherine Friend

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)

Wendell Berry

Gardening and making your own soap and home-birthing your babies are fine, but these are inherently limited actions. If we want to see genuine food safety, if we want to see sustainable products, if we want to see a better women's health system, and if we want these things for everyone, not just the privileged few with the time and education to DIY it, then we need large social changes.

Emily Matchar

Sustainable change, after all, depends not upon compliance with external mandates or blind adherence to regulation, but rather upon the pursuit of the greater good.

Douglas B. Reeves

Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on church ceilings?

Gene Logsdon

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

Derrick Jensen

The pressure of adversity is the most powerful sustainer of accountability. It's as though everything you do is multiplied by 50 in order to surpass those with a head-start. I was never capable of slacking when at the threshold of failure.

Criss Jami

If left unexecuted, even the greatest competitive strategies are not worth the paper on which they were written.

Eric Lowitt

Inaction is no longer acceptable.

Eric Lowitt

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Sustainability Quotes

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