Quotes

"You are about to be told, again, that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what this country does to its valuable natural resources?" - Utah Phillips, addressing a high school class.

"Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm." - Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 1949

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Bellow

"Personal transformation is best cultivated by partnering with the supreme agent of change, the Earth. Life is change, and nature is the wizard who enlivens its magic cycles." -Philip Sutton Chard

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus

"Experience teaches only the teachable." -- Aldous Huxley

"The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labor, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right." - Donella Meadows

"Our house is burning and we look elsewhere. Nature, mutilated and over-exploited, can no longer reconstitute itself and we refuse to admit it. Humanity is suffering. It is suffering from poor development, in the North as in the South, and we are indifferent. The Earth and humanity are in peril and we are all responsible. It is time now to open our eyes." - Jacques Chirac, French President

"I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself." - Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset

"It's not the things you don't know that will hurt you, it's the things you think you know that ain't so." -Mark Twain

Thomas Pynchon wrote in "Gravity's Rainbow" that "if they can get you asking the wrong question, they don't have to worry about the answers."

"A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves" -Edward R. Murrow

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." -- Audre Lorde

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." -- Joseph Campbell

"I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." -- Elie Weisel

"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men" Plato

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell

"When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying." Robert Thurman

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our Founding Fathers used in the great struggle for independence." - Charles Austin Beard, 1874-1948

"We the People are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts - not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution." - Abraham Lincoln

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Society is seriously handicapped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible." -- M. King Hubbert

"We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it." Patrick Henry

"Those who can convince us to believe absurdities can convince us to commit atrocities." - Voltaire

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance; that principle is contempt prior to investigation." - Herbert Spencer

"What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" - Henry David Thoreau

"I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it." - Eugene V. Debs

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when man is afraid of the light." - Plato

This is a favorite "cynical" quote, and it's our job to show that it no longer holds and to reinspire the 60% of the eligible voting population that has given up on casting their ballot. "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." - Paulo Freire

"All ethics ... rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts ... The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land." -Aldo Leopold

"Any economic system that adversely affects the planet's ability to sustain life is not only wrong; it is criminally insane and must be subverted at all cost. " - Charles Sullivan