Environmentalists from the United States

"Speaking about his Irish/Jewish/Russian ancestors, Harrison Ford said that he is “Irish as a person but I feel Jewish as an actor.”"

"The simplest answer is probably the most truthful: After two years of sitting on my ass during COVID, and waiting quite a few years for Indiana Jones to start, I had not done as much work as I wanted to and I wanted to do different things. So [Shrinking] came along, and then, very quickly after that, 1923 came along. I took the job without a script on both of them, on faith that the people who created the projects were going to deliver me a good script. I really didn’t realize how much work 1923 was going to be, and I absolutely feel it’s worth it. I’m excited to do another season of both."

"I just don't understand the need to name something "the best" or more better than something else. Saying one thing is better than another, one performance is better than another performance — there can't be a contest in this area. I don't understand that."

"I wouldn't be doing this interview if I didn't like you."

"I am in show business. I don't, for a minute, ever forget that this is a business that I'm involved in, and it plays by business' rules."

"I don't think I have something that's pronounceable as a philosophy. ... When it was fashionable to say, "May the Force be with you," I always said, "Force yourself." ... I'll say again then, "The Force is within you. Force yourself.""

"Flying is the tension between freedom and responsibility. The obligation on every flight is to ensure the safety of the people aboard. It's serious. And I continually have to meet the standards. And: it's the third dimension! We're living the two dimensional life here on the ground. When you get up there and you see the third dimension - that's what's so exciting about these kids, the Young Eagles. You fly 'em over their house and it's the first time they really know where they live."

"It is a bit of a shock to discover that there are things that a writer can bring to a script that you recognize as a shadow of your own experience. You don’t necessarily actively draw on some specific thing that happened to you—but it’s in the bank, and you want to spend it."

"I can tell you this: If I’d been less successful, I’d probably be a better parent."

"Which I still get shit about from my wife, like I don’t take mental health seriously. I do take mental health seriously. I was trying to say, as I explained to her: It’s that I accommodate all of the flaws that people go to psychiatrists to accommodate, because I accept my flaws. I accept my flaws and my failures—I don’t accept them, I own them. And certainly the more constant gardener is the better parent, and I’ve been out of town, up my own ass, for most of my life."

"[Donald Trump] doesn’t have any policies, he has whims. It scares the shit out of me. The ignorance, the hubris, the lies, the perfidy. [Trump] knows better, but he’s an instrument of the status quo and he’s making money, hand over fist, while the world goes to hell in a handbasket."

"[The President dislikes wind turbines because] he has just not seen a gold one."

"[On climate change] I knew it was coming, I have been preaching this stuff for 30 years. [...] Everything we've said about climate change has come true. Why is that not sufficient that it alarms people that they change behaviors? Because of the entrenched status quo."

"He's losing ground because everything he says is a lie [...] I'm confident we can mitigate against [climate change], that we can buy time to change behaviors, to create new technologies, to concentrate more fully on implementation of those policies. But we have to develop the political will and intellectual sophistication to realize that we human beings are capable of change. We are incredibly adaptive, we are incredibly inventive. If we concentrate on a problem we can fix it most times."

"We are teetering on the edge. [...] Indigenous people are the stewards of much of the remaining standing forests and contain the hope that these precious places can be preserved. The science has proved the value in their preservation but that does not keep them from encroachment, and the protection they are granted is tenuous in some of the countries these assets exist in."

"I'm in a room of actors, many of whom are here because they've been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work. While I'm here to receive a prize for being alive. That said, it is a little weird to be getting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the half-point of my career."

"I found a calling. A life in storytelling. An identity in pretending to be other people."

"Ours is a tough business to get into. In my case, it's been a tough business to get out of, thank God."

"Sometimes, we make entertainment. Sometimes, we make art. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we make 'em both at the same time. And if we're really fortunate, we also get to make a living doing it."

"[Thank] you to SAG-AFTRA for honoring me with this prize; this is very encouraging."

"A lot of people say that my life is wasted on me because I could be a bigger asshole than I am, but I've chosen not to be."

"The only thing Madonna will ever do like a virgin is give birth in a stable."

"#ChristineMcVie has left us. What memories, what joy, and what a legacy..."

"We Americans write our own history. And the chapters of which we're proudest are the ones where we had the courage to change. Time and again, Americans have seen the need for change, and have taken the initiative to bring that change to life."

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead."

"The day I made that statement, I was tired because I had been up all night inventing the Camcorder."

"It was clear to me that men and women were equal — if not more so."

"I'm very familiar with the importance of dairy farming in Wisconsin. I've spent the night on a dairy farm here in Wisconsin. If I'm entrusted with the presidency, you'll have someone who is very familiar with what the Wisconsin dairy industry is all about."

"I have ridden the mighty moon-worm!"

"More important than his record as a debater is Mr. Bush's record as a president. And therein lies the true opportunity for John Kerry — notwithstanding the president's political skills, his performance in office amounts to a catastrophic failure."

"American troops and American taxpayers are shouldering a huge burden with no end in sight because Mr. Bush took us to war on false premises and with no plan to win the peace."

"Please don't recount this vote."

"We would not have invaded a country that did not attack us. We would not have taken money from the working families and given it to the most wealthy families. We would not be trying to control and intimidate the news media. We would not be routinely torturing people."

"The very first words that we, the American nation, spoke were right here in Philadelphia. You know those words: "We the people." It wasn't, "We the conglomerates." It wasn't, "We the corporations." It was, "We the people.""

"In the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption. The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government."

"I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis."

"My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it."

"The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, "Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem." If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

"I'm involved in a different kind of campaign myself — to make sure that the climate crisis is the number one issue on the agenda of candidates in both parties. And I know that sounds like an unrealistic goal right now, but I will wager that by the time the elections of November 2008 come around, it will be the number one issue in both parties."

"I've chosen not to challenge the rule of law, because in our system there really is no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. When the Supreme Court makes a decision, no matter how strongly one disagrees with it, one faces a choice — are we, in John Adams' phrase, a nation of laws, or is it a contest made on raw power?"

"I've kind of fallen out of love with politics. … Whatever experience and talents I've gained over the years — I think it may well be that the highest and best use of that is to try to bring enough awareness of the solutions to the climate crisis and enough of a sense of urgency that we come together across party lines on behalf of our children."

"Of course, the popular vote was in my favour, and the outcome in the electoral college was not driven by an effort to count every vote that was cast, because the counting was truncated by a Supreme Court decision. In the American system, unfortunately there is no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. Given those two remaining alternatives, I took the advice of Winston Churchill, who said that the American people generally do the right thing after first exhausting every available alternative. Choosing to live under the rule of law seemed to be the only alternative remaining, even though I strongly, strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court decision. Historians and scholars will put that decision in its own separate category."

"There's an old African proverb that says "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." We have to go far — quickly. And that means we have to quickly find a way to change the world's consciousness about exactly what we're facing, and why we have to work to solve it."

"The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door." The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?" Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?""

"The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk. And even more — if more should be required — the future of human civilization is at stake."

"The entire North polar ice cap may well be completely gone in 5 years. How can we comprehend the world in 3 billion years the period of time during which it has existed to 5 years the period of time during which it is expected to now disappear?"

"These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr. [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."

"Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality."

"Over a year ago I changed my diet to a vegan diet, really just to experiment to see what it was like. And I felt better, so I continued with it. Now, for many people, that choice is connected to environmental ethics and health issues and all that stuff, but I just wanted to try it to see what it was like. In a visceral way, I felt better, so I've continued with it and I'm likely to continue it for the rest of my life."

"This is a time of great opportunity for our country. Our economy is the envy of the world. Living standards are rising — and the gap between the rich and the poor is closing for the first time in 20 years. America is a powerful engine for the global economy, because we have met our responsibility to balance our budget, to begin paying down our debt, and to embrace our role in supporting free markets and economic growth among all nations."

"For all of my career, I have believed that America has a responsibility to lead in the world. That's why I was one of only a few Democrats in the United States Senate to vote in support of the use of force to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait."

"We are now in a new era. To label this time "the post-Cold War era" belies its uniqueness and its significance. We are now in a Global Age. Like it or not, we live in an age when our destinies and the destinies of billions of people around the globe are increasingly intertwined. When our grand domestic and international challenges are also intertwined. We should neither bemoan nor naively idealize this new reality. We should deal with it."

"Today, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we need a foreign policy that addresses the classic security threats — and understands the new ones as well. We need a new approach for a new century — grounded in our own economic and security interests, but uplifted by what is right in the world. We need to pursue a policy of "forward engagement" — addressing problems early in their development before they become crises; addressing them as close to the source of the problem as possible; and having the forces and resources to deal with those threats as soon after their emergence as possible."

"First, America must have a strong defense. We must never forget that our national defense is about much more than the land within our borders. Just as we fought and conquered totalitarianism during World War Two — just as we fought and conquered communism during the Cold War — we are defending the idea of freedom itself."

"But we need not only a new generation of weapons. We need a new generation of thinking. That means strengthening and renewing our key alliances."

"In the Global Age, we must be prepared to engage in regional conflicts selectively — where the stability of a region important to our national security is at stake; where we can assure ourselves that nothing short of military engagement can secure our national interest; where we are certain that the use of military force can succeed in doing so; where we have allies willing to help share the burden, and where the cost is proportionate. America cannot be the world's policeman. But we must reject the new isolationism that says: don't help anywhere, because we can not help everywhere."

"We need to intensify cooperation with civilized governments all over the world to combat the common threat of terrorism."

"The disruption of the world's ecological systems — from the rise of global warming and the consequent damage to our climate balance, to the loss of living species and the depletion of ocean fisheries and forest habitats — continues at a frightening rate. Practically every day, it becomes clearer to us that must act now to protect our Earth, while preserving and creating jobs for our people. And at the very same time that these threats are developing, the traditional nation-state itself is changing — as power moves upwards and downwards, to everything from supra-national organizations and coalitions all the way down to feuding clans. Susceptible to tyrants willing to exploit ethnic and religious rivalries, the weakest of these states have either imploded into civil war or threatened to lash out across their borders. To meet these challenges requires cooperation on a scale not seen before. A realistic reading of the world today demands reinvigorated international and regional institutions. It demands that we confront threats before they spiral out of the control. And it requires American leadership — to protect our interests and uphold our values."

"I believe that now we have a profound responsibility to open the gates of opportunity for all the world's people so that they can become stakeholders in the kind of society we would like to build at large in the world and at home. Let me be clear: promoting prosperity throughout the world is a crucial form of forward engagement. We know how to launch this renaissance — for what has worked to spark the economic boom here in the United States is, at its essence, the way we can spark the fires of growth abroad. The difference is one of degree, not kind."

"We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country, but among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential of the Information Age."

"We need not only open trading systems, but systems that work for people around the world — taking into account not only the bottom line, but the well-being of working men and women, the protection of children against sweatshop labor, and the protection of the environment."

"I believe that we must not waste this moment. A responsible foreign policy must look outward from a stance of forward engagement, to our broadest hopes for the world — not just inward, to our narrowest fears. A responsible foreign policy must harness all our economic and military might — but it must also make use of our values and principles."

"If we meet our great responsibility, I believe we can not only deter aggression and create an ever more secure and widening world of security — but we can also shape, step by step, a future of liberty and opportunity across the world."

"Just moments ago, I spoke with George W. Bush and congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States. And I promised him that I wouldn't call him back this time. I offered to meet with him as soon as possible so that we can start to heal the divisions of the campaign and the contest through which we've just passed."

"Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession. I also accept my responsibility, which I will discharge unconditionally, to honor the new President-elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together in fulfillment of the great vision that our Declaration of Independence defines and that our Constitution affirms and defends."

"This has been an extraordinary election. But in one of God's unforeseen paths, this belatedly broken impasse can point us all to a new common ground, for its very closeness can serve to remind us that we are one people with a shared history and a shared destiny."

"I know that many of my supporters are disappointed. I am too. But our disappointment must be overcome by our love of country. And I say to our fellow members of the world community, let no one see this contest as a sign of American weakness. The strength of American democracy is shown most clearly through the difficulties it can overcome."

"This is America. Just as we fight hard when the stakes are high, we close ranks and come together when the contest is done. And while there will be time enough to debate our continuing differences, now is the time to recognize that that which unites us is greater than that which divides us. While we yet hold and do not yield our opposing beliefs, there is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America and we put country before party; we will stand together behind our new president."

"I've seen America in this campaign, and I like what I see. It's worth fighting for and that's a fight I'll never stop. As for the battle that ends tonight, I do believe, as my father once said, that "No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shape the soul and let the glory out.""

"A lot of people have let me know they wished I had been speaking out on public affairs long before now. But in the aftermath of a very divisive election, I thought it would be graceless to do so and possibly damaging to the nation. And then came September 11th. In the immediate aftermath, I expressed full support for our Commander-in-Chief, President George W. Bush. Tonight I reaffirm that support of the President's conduct of the military campaign in Afghanistan, and I appreciate his candor in telling the American people that this will be a long struggle — for which the nation must be braced and its political leadership united across party lines."

"If yesterday marked the five month anniversary of the darkest day in American history, today — the Day After — must mark the anniversary of one of the greatest days in American history: because on September 12, a bruised and battered nation began to fight back. Some fought back by rushing to aid and rescue the few surviving victims of the tragedy — and to aid and comfort the grieving and bereaved."

"What are the next steps in the war against terrorism? And beyond immediate next steps, what is the longer-range plan of action? And finally, what should be done to deal with root causes of this threat?"

"As important as identifying Iraq, Iran and North Korea for what they are, we must be equally bold in identifying other evils that confront us. For there is another Axis of Evil in the world: poverty and ignorance; disease and environmental disorder; corruption and political oppression. We may well put down terror in its present manifestations. But if we do not attend to the larger fundamentals as well, then the ground is fertile and has been seeded for the next generation of those born to hate us, who will hold these things up before the world's poor and dispossessed, and say that all these things are in our image, and rekindle the war we are now hoping to snuff out."

"The evil we now confront is not just the one-time creation of a charismatic leader and his co-conspirators, or even of a handful of regimes. What we deal with now is today's manifestation of an anger welling up from deep layers of grievance shared by many millions of people. Military force alone cannot deal with this. Public diplomacy alone cannot drain this reservoir. What will be needed is a far reaching American strategy for encouraging reform, and for engaging day in and day out with societies that are trying to cast off the curse of bitter experience relived continuously. Hope for the future is the only way to put out these fires."

"Disrespect, the feeling that what one has to offer in life has been rejected, the feeling that one has joined history's losers can make us as human beings more vulnerable to evil."

"We must acknowledge that the utter poverty of hundreds of millions of people is not a matter for compassion only, but a threat in the long term to the growth and vigor of the global economic system. We must see it as a part of our charge to help create economic opportunity so that the gap between the richest and poorest does not grow ever wider."

"Our most important immediate task is to continue to tear up the Al Qaeda network, and since it is present in many countries, it will be an operation, which requires new forms of sustained cooperation with other governments. Even if we give first priority to the destruction of terrorist networks, and even if we succeed, there are still governments that could bring us great harm. And there is a clear case that one of these governments in particular represents a virulent threat in a class by itself: Iraq. As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table. To my way of thinking, the real question is not the principle of the thing, but of making sure that this time we will finish the matter on our terms. But finishing it on our terms means more than a change of regime in Iraq."

"In 1991, I crossed party lines and supported the use of force against Saddam Hussein, but he was allowed to survive his defeat as the result of a calculation we all had reason to deeply regret for the ensuing decade. And we still do. So this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right. It must be an action set up carefully and on the basis of the most realistic concepts. Failure cannot be an option, which means that we must be prepared to go the limit. And wishful thinking based on best-case scenarios or excessively literal transfers of recent experience to different conditions would be a recipe for disaster."

"It is important that America not just stand tall against terrorists, but America must also stand for economic opportunity and democratic freedoms. America must stand for human rights. America must stand for the rights of women. America must stand for environmental protection and energy conservation. The Administration in which I served looked at the challenges we faced in the world and said we wished to tackle these "With others, if possible; alone, if we must." This Administration sometimes seems inclined to stand that on its head, so that the message is: "With others, if we must; by ourselves, if possible.""

"One of the truly bad things about our politics is that it incites each administration to attack every last thing its predecessor has done, and to either tear down what was left or rename it so that its parentage can be forgotten. We did some of that — but we also kept a lot of what we inherited from the first Bush administration and we protected it and built upon it. The struggle against terror may last for a very long time, even past a shift of parties in power."

"When all is said and done, I hope that when the people of our country next return the White House for a time to the Democratic Party, our leadership then will be big enough to salute the present administration for what it will have done that is wise and good. And to build upon it forthrightly. Towards that end, we must now expand our concept of what is needed to reach the goals upon which we all agree. The United States needs to create a world made more just and more hopeful, not just a world made more profitable for ourselves. I hope that this President's record makes it damn hard for the competition to complain about his record in foreign policy. That may be bad for the loyal opposition. But it's good for the people, who deserve it. And I promise my support for whatever he may do in support of that prayer."

"I'm going to be candid with you. I had hoped to be back here this week under different circumstances, running for re-election. But you know the old saying: you win some, you lose some. And then there's that little-known third category. But I didn't come here tonight to talk about the past. After all, I don't want you to think that I lie awake at night counting and recounting sheep. I prefer to focus on the future, because I know from my own experience that America's a land of opportunity, where every little boy and girl has a chance to grow up and win the popular vote."

"I love this country deeply, and even though I always look to the future with optimism and hope, I do think it's worth pausing for just a moment as we begin this year's convention, to take note of two very important lessons from four years ago. The first lesson is this: Take it from me; every vote counts. In our democracy, every vote has power. And never forget that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away from you or talk you into throwing it away. And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted. Let's make sure that the Supreme Court does not pick the next President, and that this President is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court. The second lesson from 2000 is this: What happens in a presidential election matters — a lot. The outcome profoundly affects the lives of all 293 million Americans, and people in the rest of the world, too. The choice of who is president affects your life and your family's future."

"I sincerely ask those watching at home tonight who supported President Bush four years ago: did you really get what you expected from the candidate you voted for? Is our country more united today? Or more divided? Has the promise of compassionate conservatism been fulfilled? Or do those words now ring hollow? For that matter, are the economic policies really conservative at all? For example, did you expect the largest deficits in history, year after year? One right after another? And the loss of more than a million jobs?"

"Regardless of your opinion at the beginning of this war, isn't it now abundantly obvious that the way this war has been managed by the administration has gotten us into very serious trouble? Wouldn't we be better off with a new President who hasn't burned his bridges to our allies, and who can rebuild respect for America in the world? Isn't cooperation with other nations crucial to solving our dilemma in Iraq? Isn't it also critical to defeating the terrorists?"

"We have to be crystal clear about the threat we face from terrorism. It is deadly. It is real. It is imminent. But in order to protect our people, shouldn't we focus on the real source of this threat: the group that attacked us and is trying to attack us again: Al Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden? Wouldn't we be safer with a President who didn't insist on confusing Al Qaeda with Iraq? Doesn't that divert too much of our attention away from the principal danger?"

"One of our greatest strengths as a democracy is that when we're headed in the wrong direction, we can correct our course. When policies are clearly not working, we, the people, can change them. If our leaders make mistakes, we can hold them accountable — even if they never admit their mistakes. I firmly believe America needs new leadership that will make us stronger at home and respected in the world."

"George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world. He promised to "restore honor and integrity to the White House." Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest President since Richard Nixon. Honor? He decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, international treaties, the opinions of our allies, the role of Congress and the courts, or what Jefferson described as "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind." He did not honor the advice, experience and judgment of our military leaders in designing his invasion of Iraq. And now he will not honor our fallen dead by attending any funerals or even by permitting photos of their flag-draped coffins."

"How did we get from September 12th, 2001, when a leading French newspaper ran a giant headline with the words "We Are All Americans Now" and when we had the good will and empathy of all the world — to the horror that we all felt in witnessing the pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib? To begin with, from its earliest days in power, this administration sought to radically destroy the foreign policy consensus that had guided America since the end of World War II. The long successful strategy of containment was abandoned in favor of the new strategy of "preemption." And what they meant by preemption was not the inherent right of any nation to act preemptively against an imminent threat to its national security, but rather an exotic new approach that asserted a unique and unilateral U.S. right to ignore international law wherever it wished to do so and take military action against any nation, even in circumstances where there was no imminent threat. All that is required, in the view of Bush's team is the mere assertion of a possible, future threat — and the assertion need be made by only one person, the President."

"More disturbing still was their frequent use of the word "dominance" to describe their strategic goal, because an American policy of dominance is as repugnant to the rest of the world as the ugly dominance of the helpless, naked Iraqi prisoners has been to the American people. Dominance is as dominance does."

"Dominance is not really a strategic policy or political philosophy at all. It is a seductive illusion that tempts the powerful to satiate their hunger for more power still by striking a Faustian bargain. And as always happens — sooner or later — to those who shake hands with the devil, they find out too late that what they have given up in the bargain is their soul."

"One of the clearest indications of the impending loss of intimacy with one's soul is the failure to recognize the existence of a soul in those over whom power is exercised, especially if the helpless come to be treated as animals, and degraded."

"There is good and evil in every person. And what makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our natural distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have led us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations more than the people of any other nation."

"Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only "better angels" in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation — especially the temptation to abuse power over others. Our founders understood full well that a system of checks and balances is needed in our constitution because every human being lives with an internal system of checks and balances that cannot be relied upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow citizens."

"What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances."

"The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of the truth that characterized the Administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th. There was then, there is now and there would have been regardless of what Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation — because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him."

"President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror." It's not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists."

"The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict " has arguably focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition." The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks."

"The war plan was incompetent in its rejection of the advice from military professionals and the analysis of the intelligence was incompetent in its conclusion that our soldiers would be welcomed with garlands of flowers and cheering crowds. Thus we would not need to respect the so-called Powell doctrine of overwhelming force. There was also in Rumsfeld's planning a failure to provide security for nuclear materials, and to prevent widespread lawlessness and looting. Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers even though they were denied the tools and the numbers they needed for their mission."

"Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress in February that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops." But because Rumsfeld and Bush did not want to hear disagreement with their view that Iraq could be invaded at a much lower cost, Shinseki was hushed and then forced out."

"The soldiers who are accused of committing these atrocities are, of course, responsible for their own actions and if found guilty, must be severely and appropriately punished. But they are not the ones primarily responsible for the disgrace that has been brought upon the United States of America. Private Lynndie England did not make the decision that the United States would not observe the Geneva Convention. Specialist Charles Graner was not the one who approved a policy of establishing an American Gulag of dark rooms with naked prisoners to be "stressed" and even — we must use the word — tortured — to force them to say things that legal procedures might not induce them to say. These policies were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White House."

"Indeed, the secrecy of the program indicates an understanding that the regular military culture and mores would not support these activities and neither would the American public or the world community. Another implicit acknowledgement of violations of accepted standards of behavior is the process of farming out prisoners to countries less averse to torture and giving assignments to private contractors. President Bush set the tone for our attitude for suspects in his State of the Union address. He noted that more than 3,000 "suspected terrorists" had been arrested in many countries and then he added, "and many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our allies." George Bush promised to change the tone in Washington. And indeed he did."

"President Bush owes more than one apology. On the list of those he let down are the young soldiers who are themselves apparently culpable, but who were clearly put into a moral cesspool. The perpetrators as well as the victims were both placed in their relationship to one another by the policies of George W. Bush. How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people. How dare they subject us to such dishonor and disgrace. How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison."

"One of the Generals in charge of this war policy went on a speaking tour in his spare time to declare before evangelical groups that the US is in a holy war as "Christian Nation battling Satan." This same General Boykin was the person who ordered the officer who was in charge of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay to extend his methods to Iraq detainees, prisoners."

"As a nation, our greatest export has always been hope: hope that through the rule of law people can be free to pursue their dreams, that democracy can supplant repression and that justice, not power, will be the guiding force in society. Our moral authority in the world derived from the hope anchored in the rule of law. With this blatant failure of the rule of law from the very agents of our government, we face a great challenge in restoring our moral authority in the world and demonstrating our commitment to bringing a better life to our global neighbors."

"These horrors were the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration's contempt for the rule of law. And the dominance they have been seeking is truly not simply unworthy of America — it is also an illusory goal in its own right. Our world is unconquerable because the human spirit is unconquerable, and any national strategy based on pursuing the goal of domination is doomed to fail because it generates its own opposition, and in the process, creates enemies for the would-be dominator. A policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the United States and creates recruits for Al Qaeda, it also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating the efforts of terrorists who wish harm and intimidate Americans."

"Unilateralism, as we have painfully seen in Iraq, is its own reward. Going it alone may satisfy a political instinct but it is dangerous to our military, even without their Commander in Chief taunting terrorists to "bring it on.""

"Our future is dependent upon increasing cooperation and interdependence in a world tied ever more closely together by technologies of communications and travel. The emergence of a truly global civilization has been accompanied by the recognition of truly global challenges that require global responses that, as often as not, can only be led by the United States — and only if the United States restores and maintains its moral authority to lead."

"Make no mistake, it is precisely our moral authority that is our greatest source of strength, and it is precisely our moral authority that has been recklessly put at risk by the cheap calculations and mean compromises of conscience wagered with history by this willful president."

"The same dark spirit of domination has led them to — for the first time in American history — imprison American citizens with no charges, no right to see a lawyer, no right to notify their family, no right to know of what they are accused, and no right to gain access to any court to present an appeal of any sort. The Bush Administration has even acquired the power to compel librarians to tell them what any American is reading, and to compel them to keep silent about the request — or else the librarians themselves can also be imprisoned. They have launched an unprecedented assault on civil liberties, on the right of the courts to review their actions, on the right of the Congress to have information to how they are spending the public's money and the right of the news media to have information about the policies they are pursuing."

"The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration. To me, as glaring as the evidence of this in the pictures themselves was the revelation that it was established practice for prisoners to be moved around during ICRC visits so that they would not be available for visits. That, no one can claim, was the act of individuals. That was policy set from above with the direct intention to violate US values it was to be upholding. It was the kind of policy we see — and criticize in places like China and Cuba."

"One of the most tragic consequences of these official crimes is that it will be very hard for any of us as Americans — at least for a very long time — to effectively stand up for human rights elsewhere and criticize other governments, when our policies have resulted in our soldiers behaving so monstrously. This administration has shamed America and deeply damaged the cause of freedom and human rights everywhere, thus undermining the core message of America to the world."

"President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world — but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America."

"In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president. I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability… So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands."

"Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several "tipping points" that could — within as little as 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the earth's atmosphere."

"It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick."

"For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of all payroll taxes — including those for social security and unemployment compensation — and the replacement of that revenue in the form of pollution taxes — principally on CO2. The overall level of taxation would remain exactly the same. It would be, in other words, a revenue neutral tax swap. But, instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees, it would discourage business from producing more pollution. Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an "externality." This absurd label means, in essence: we don't need to keep track of this stuff so let's pretend it doesn't exist. And sure enough, when it's not recognized in the marketplace, it does make it much easier for government, business, and all the rest of us to pretend that it doesn't exist. But what we're pretending doesn't exist is the stuff that is destroying the habitability of the planet."

"This is an opportunity for bipartisanship and transcendence, an opportunity to find our better selves and in rising to meet this challenge, create a better brighter future — a future worthy of the generations who come after us and who have a right to be able to depend on us."

"Television's quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages. Our systematic exposure to fear and other arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician."

"It is well documented that humans are especially fearful of threats that can be easily pictured or imagined. For example, one study found that people are willing to spend significantly more for flight insurance that covers "death by terrorism" than for flight insurance that covers "death by any cause." Now, logically, flight insurance for death by any cause would cover terrorism in addition to a number of other potential problems. But something about the buzzword terrorism creates a vivid impression that generates excessive fear."

"Social scientists have found that when confronted with either an enormous threat or a huge reward, people tend to focus on the magnitude of the consequence and ignore the probability."

"September 11 had a profound impact on all of us. But after initially responding in an entirely appropriate way, the administration began to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism to create a political case for attacking Iraq. Despite the absence of proof, Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with al-Qaeda and to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability. Defeating Saddam was conflated with bringing war to the terrorists, even though it really meant diverting attention and resources from those who actually attacked us. When the president of the United States stood before the people of this nation and invited us to "imagine" a terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon, he was referring to terrorists who actually had no connection to Iraq. But because our nation had been subjected to the horrors of 9/11, when our president said "imagine with me this new fear," it was easy enough to bypass the reasoning process that might otherwise have led people to ask, "Wait a minute, Mr. President, where's your evidence?""

"Terrorism relies on the stimulation of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger that the terrorists are capable of posing. Ironically, President Bush's response to the terrorist attack of September 11 was, in effect, to further distort America's political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger Iraq was capable of posing."

"History will surely judge America's decision to invade and occupy a fragile and unstable nation that did not attack us and posed no threat to us as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, to be sure, but not one who posed an imminent danger to us. It is a decision that could have been made only at a moment in time when reason was playing a sharply diminished role in our national deliberations."

"For the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War. It is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason — the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power — remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault."

"It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack."

"At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess — an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole. While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious."

"In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience.""

"Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."

"The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response."

"Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets — through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas."

"The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy."

"In some areas of Poland, children are regularly taken underground into deep mines to gain some respite from the buildup of gases and pollution of all sorts in the air. One can almost imagine their teachers emerging tentatively from the mine, carrying canaries to warn the children when it’s no longer safe for them to stay above the ground."

"The interior of the earth is extremely hot - several million degrees."

"Al Gore has been warning and educating us about the dangers of climate change for decades. He saw this coming before others in public life and never stopped pushing for action to save our planet, even in the face of public indifference and attacks from those determined to defend the indefensible. His tireless advocacy and his Academy Award-winning film have inspired countless people around the world to join the fight against climate change. I am thrilled by this well-deserved recognition and am grateful to the Nobel Committee for awarding the Peace Prize to him and to those doing ground-breaking work at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

"I want to congratulate our former Vice President Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize today. No other person has worked harder or done more to draw much needed attention to the crisis of global climate change, one of the most critical issues facing our planet. Future generations will thank him for his work to save our way of life. But the fight is far from over. His example should motivate each one of us to commit ourselves to doing everything we can in our own lives to save our precious planet."

"nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean's are one. We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above."

"The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to former vice president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in December 2007 is a clear sign that global warming activism has forced the issue to the front of the international agenda. From Step It Up marches to international treaties, the climate change movement continues to reinvent itself. Scientists have been vindicated. Activists are energized. As Al Gore said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, "The future is knocking at our door right now. ... The next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: 'What were you thinking; why didn't you act?' Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?' "We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. So let us renew it, and say together: 'We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."""

"Like him or not, he has turned his efforts to an important cause, under historical and political circumstances that would have tempted many people to drown themselves in drink or move to Bhutan. It's interesting about the Nobel Peace Prize — unlike the quirky and PC-conscious prize for Literature, or the quasi-Nobel "medal" in economics — that its list of winners holds up very, very well under historical scrutiny. There are a few choices that look fishy in retrospect. (Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973??? Arafat as co-winner with Peres and Rabin in 1994?) But the great majority stand up very well. Desmond Tutu, and then Mandela and de Klerk. Albert Schweitzer. George C. Marshall. Lech Walesa, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Norwegian Nobel Institute has earned the benefit of the doubt for choosing people whose achievements will stand up over time. So: might this award make Gore sound even more righteous? Maybe, but who cares. He has earned it. A lot of other people have the big head on much flimsier grounds."

"Mr. Gore lost the presidency, but in the dignity and grace with which he gave up his legal fight, he united America. Then, faced with what to do with the rest of his life, he took up a personal crusade to combat climate change, even though the odds were stacked against him, his soapbox was small, his audiences were measured in hundreds, and his critics were legion. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore stuck with it and over time has played a central role in building a global consensus for action on this issue."

"Parson Al winning the Nobel Peace Prize was as predictable as his Oscar for Best Documentary, and represents the final debasement of a once-prestigious award."

"the valiant struggle by former Vice President Al Gore and others to wake us up to the impending catastrophe that will beset us if we do not curb global warming is an act of faith."

"Algore has conferred upon himself the biggest ticket of his life in the Nobel Prize. Nothing says "I'm smart" quite like an award from a bunch of socialist Swedes, in the community that Algore runs around in. Much the same way as the Nobel Prize gave credence to Jimmy Carter's anti-Semitism and Yasser Arafat's peace campaign, Algore now has that same credibility for the religion of global warming. In my mind, in a fair and honest world, the recipient of this award — the reason for this award being awarded, manmade global warming — should debunk it, because the Nobel committee has lost all credibility long before they gave this award to Algore and the United Nations. Sadly, this will probably, in the minds of the ignorant and those who pay scant attention, lend convenience to the whole phony hoax that is manmade global warming."

"But as Al Gore says, if denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, despair ain’t just a tire in the trunk."

"[George W. Bush] was having lunch with a good friend of mine in 1999 and talking about running for president. he said, "I don't know if I'll run, but if I do, I'll win." My friend, who is a Democrat, thought it was the usual political bragging and said, "why do you say that? Every candidate says that." W turned to him and said, "Because I know exactly who I am and Al Gore has no idea who he is." You know something? W nailed it."

"When the election was finally decided, I, like many reporters I knew, hoped to never write another political story as long we lived. We were sick of politics. But one day the next January, I had an idea for a fun piece about how the vice-presidential candidacy of a Jew, Joe Lieberman, had made the world safer for ethnic humor. To take one example, Al Gore had joked on David Letterman’s show that their ticket would be there for the American people "24/6"—a reference to Lieberman’s observance of the Jewish Sabbath"

"Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000..."

"Not only is Al Gore committed to the New Democrats' corporate agenda, but on social issues other than abortion he is to the right of President Clinton. Counting on fear to whip the left wing of the party into line, he basically ignores it and has not made any gestures to co-opt the Nader vote. Instead he merely demonizes the Naderites as spoilers...Both Gore and Lieberman are pandering to religious and moral conservatives, again ignoring the secularists and social liberals who are the backbone of the party. Neither of them ever met a civil liberty he liked. I am chilled by their demagogic attacks on popular culture. Gore's talk of "cultural pollution" reminds me of Nazi rhetoric."

"The key word for me on him is "inspiration." He is a leader by inspiration. He sets an example. It's quite important that people realize that I don't see him as a glad-handing show-off, a one-man vigilante force who rights every wrong. Basically, he's a pacifist, a man who comes along and says, 'What can I do to help?' He stands on the sidelines until there is real trouble. He does not want to get involved unless it's absolutely necessary because he thinks people should learn to make their own decisions."

"Somewhere in Time, while it errs on the side of pretentiousness, is an absolutely honest attempt to create an old-fashioned romance. It's based on love rather than on sex or X-rated bedroom scenes. I don't know how to talk about a love story without getting all gooey about it, but the script excited me because of the situation of the leading character... His problem struck me as that of many people. They've got everything going for them, or so they say, except for a real commitment, a real love."

"Superman is nothing more than a popular retelling of the Christ story, or Greek mythology. It's an archetype, watered down and made in vivid colors for twelve-year-old's mentality. It's pop mythology, which extends to the actor, then seeps over to a demand that that actor reflect the needs of the worshipers. The worship doesn't only go on in the temples — it goes on in the streets, and restaurants, in magazines. But, you know, I'm from New Jersey, I'm not from Olympus or Krypton, so back off 'cause I can't take the responsibility."

"So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable."

"I'm starting a new chapter in my life, and you have no idea how much that means."

"We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them."

"When the first Superman movie came out, I gave dozens of interviews to promote it. The most frequent question was: What is a hero? My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous action without considering the consequences. Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them."

"What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely."

"In 1984, the government spent zero dollars on AIDS research, because AIDS was thought to be a death sentence, and the virus was far too complicated to deal with. Today, the government spends annually $1.8 billion a year on research, and people who would have been dead four or five years ago now have the virus virtually undetectable in their bloodstream, and they're living normal lives. That was something thought impossible until we put money and talent together and aimed it toward a problem."

""Neglect - even misstatement - of recent scientific data was also evident in last year's testimony before this subcommittee by the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation. Mr. Reeve, on behalf of the Foundation, testified that adult stem cells are no substitute for embryonic cells because they cannot be "pluripotent" but are confined to a narrow range of specialization. Yet a few weeks after that hearing, researchers funded by the NIH and the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation published a study indicating that adult bone marrow stem cells "may constitute an abundant and accessible cellular reservoir for the treatment of a variety of neurologic diseases." The first sentence of the published study states: "Pluripotent stem cells have been detected in multiple tissues in the adult, participating in normal replacement and repair, while undergoing self-renewal. The authors cite eleven other studies in support of this observation. Their article, prepared under the aegis of Mr. Reeve's foundation, was received for publication in March 2000, before Mr. Reeve testified in April that adult stem cells cannot be pluripotent."

"With the life expectancy of average Americans heading as high as 85 to 90 years, it is our responsibility to do everything possible to protect the quality of life of the present and future generations. A critical factor will be what we do with human embryonic stem cells. These cells have the potential to cure diseases and conditions ranging from Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis to diabetes and heart disease, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease, even spinal-cord injuries like my own. They have been called the body's self-repair kit. Their extraordinary potential is a recent discovery. And much basic research needs to be done before they can be sent to the front lines in the battle against disease. But no obstacle should stand in the way of responsible investigation of their possibilities. To that end, the work should be funded and supervised by the Federal Government through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That will avoid abuses by for-profit corporations, avoid secrecy and destructive competition between laboratories and ensure the widest possible dissemination of scientific breakthroughs. Human trials should be conducted either on the NIH campus or in carefully monitored clinical facilities. Fortunately, stem cells are readily available and easily harvested. In fertility clinics, women are given a choice of what to do with unused fertilized embryos: they can be discarded, donated to research or frozen for future use. Under NIH supervision, scientists should be allowed to take cells only from women who freely consent to their use for research. This process would not be open ended; within one to two years a sufficient number could be gathered and made available to investigators. For those reasons, the ban on federally funded human embryonic stem cell research should be lifted as quickly as possible. But why has the use of discarded embryos for research suddenly become such an issue? Is it more ethical for a woman to donate unused embryos that will never become human beings, or to let them be tossed away as so much garbage when they could help save thousands of lives?"

"Specific to spinal cord injured patients, immuno-suppressive drugs are not an option in a stem cell transplant procedure because of the increased risk of side effects. Spinal cord injuries cause many individuals to be more susceptible to respiratory infection due to an inability to clear secretions, limited chest movement, and a need for ventilation assistance. In addition, there is a greater risk of bladder infection and sepsis due to chronic catheterization. Some spinal cord patients who incur an infection are further compromised by the infection seeding around the heart. Urinary tract infections and skin breakdowns due to immobility are common causes of dsyreflexia, an event which often triggers heart attacks and strokes. I have been told by Dr. John McDonald of Washington University in St. Louis, that because this immune system of a spinal cord patient is already so compromised, it would be irresponsible to transplant stem cells into an individual that did not match his or her own DNA. Although there is still a risk of rejection, no reputable doctor would prescribe Cyclosporin, the leading immuno-suppressive drug therapy, to a spinal cord injured patient because the risk of death is too great. Somatic cell nuclear transfer could dramatically improve the treatment efficacy of any stem cell transplant because it uses one's own genetic makeup. In addition, there is the potential of eliminating the risks and side effects associated with highly toxic immuno-suppressive agents."

"The budget of the National Institute of Health in 1998 was 12 billion dollars. However, due to Congress and also got pressure applied by a number of disease groups, the budget for fiscal 2003 will be 27.2 billion dollars. And human ... HHS Secretary Thompson has said there is plenty of money available for the kind of research. Doubling the budget of the NIH and more within five years has been an extraordinary accomplishment. So to say that there isn't ... I mean, more money would be nice, but to say there's not enough money to do research into therapeutic cloning is a false statement."

"In the early '80s, the public discourse about AIDS was divisive and ugly. Some elected officials said the disease was God's revenge on people who lived a certain lifestyle. The federal government wouldn't fund research for a cure. But, today, the NIH spends $1.8 billion on AIDS research annually, and the virus is no longer an epidemic in this country. So, how did we get from that climate of fear and animosity in the early '80s to where we are today? Well, it's by the extraordinary efforts of ordinary individuals, then change occurred, as it has time and time again throughout our history."

"It gives me a moral compass. I often refer to Abe Lincoln, who said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion." I think we all have a little voice inside us that will guide us. It may be God, I don't know. But I think that if we shut out all the noise and clutter from our lives and listen to that voice, it will tell us the right thing to do. The Unitarian believes that God is good, and believes that God believes that man is good. Inherently. The Unitarian God is not a God of vengeance. And that is something I can appreciate."

"Perhaps it is my job to offend some scientists. I'm not asking them to be reckless or unprofessional, but I do want to reinforce a sense of urgency."

"What I do is based on powers we all have inside us; the ability to endure; the ability to love, to carry on, to make the best of what we have — and you don’t have to be a ‘Superman’ to do it."

"When I met with the President in May of 1996, he stated that the ratio of research to clinical results is greater in this country than anywhere else in the world. Money spent on research brings practical results that absolutely justify the investment. Let's look at a few examples. NIH-sponsored research has resulted in the identification of genetic mutations that cause osteoporosis, Lou Gehrig's Disease, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. Effective treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) has been developed and today nearly 80 percent of children diagnosed with ALL are alive and disease-free after 5 years. Because of research, the nature of medicine is changing. We are approaching disease at the cellular level. We are targeting problems earlier, more specifically, less intrusively, with greater success and fewer side effects. Advances in genetics will soon let us intervene in disease before symptoms appear."

"We must not stop this progress because we are unwilling to commit enough money to get the job done. It is imperative that the public--and more importantly our elected representatives understand that research today is not speculative. It is not a waste of money. It is the only way to relieve suffering while helping to save the American economy at the same time. Making this a reality demands an investment of real dollars--funds that just don't fit within the constraints of the Budget Agreement passed by Congress this week, which proposes to reduce overall health spending by $100 million next year and by more than $2 billion over the next 5 years."

"[R]ecent experience has shown that even the most formidable lobbyists cannot derail legislation that has bipartisan and public support. The NRA was not successful in repealing the ban on assault weapons. The American public watched in disbelief as a dozen tobacco company executives testified at a Senate hearing that nicotine is not addictive and denied allegations that nicotine levels were being raised in cigarettes in order to increase addiction. Now we are witnessing the demise of the "Marlboro Man" and "Joe Camel". There are lawsuits in virtually every state by individuals demanding punitive damages against the tobacco companies. Just this week, thousands of government workers petitioned the President to ban smoking in government buildings. I sincerely doubt that the tobacco lobby will be able to stop this initiative. The religious right led by Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan and the Christian Coalition tried twice unsuccessfully (in 1992 and 1996) to hijack the Republican Party and failed in both attempts. Here again, was a case when a supposedly powerful lobby did not succeed in promoting their agenda."

"The insurance companies see this legislation as a tax. My question is: why is that unreasonable, particularly when the insurance companies would save so much money in the long run. Research will keep the American people healthier, resulting in fewer insurance claims. We tax oil companies and use the money to build and maintain highways. In New York state, if you win the lottery, you pay a significant tax which goes to a state fund for education. Most states have sales taxes which are a major source of revenue for a wide variety of programs and services that benefit the public. Why shouldn't insurance companies be asked to help solve the health care crisis in this country? Because of the advances to date, we can save millions of lives. Our challenge for the future is not just improving the quality of life of those we save, but finding the cures to prevent that suf-fering in the first place. Our scientists are on the threshold of major breakthroughs in almost every disease or condition that now cause so much hardship for people across the country and around the world. The insurance companies owe it to our families and our society to make a small sacrifice which can do so much good. I hope that this excellent piece of legislation which already has tremendous grassroots support will be enacted during this legislative session."

"Now fortunately, even a couple of years before my injury, we were in the dark ages about spinal cord and the common wisdom was that the cord could not regenerate. But I want to say that one of the great heros and really the father of regeneration is a distinguished Canadian who will go down in history as the father of spinal cord recovery. And that is Professor Alberto Aguierro at McGill University. He is the one who discovered that there are two protein molecules at the base of the brain stem. The positive function of these molecules is to stop the brain from overdeveloping during gestation. But then in the adult these protein molecules perform a negative function, they stop the regeneration of nerves in the spinal cord. Now you can chop off your hand then a surgeon can sew it back on again and you can go out and throw a baseball, because of the plasticity and ease with which the peripheral nervous system is able to make appropriate connections. And the good news now for us is that they have discovered nerves regenerate in the spinal cord they seek to find appropriate connections across the injury, across the lesion. And when these appropriate connections are made there will be improvement in sensation and in motor function and depending on the severity of the injury, there are endless possibilities to how much recovery can occur. If someone has been very damaged there may be limitations, if someone is less damaged there may be a better outcome. But the point is, through regeneration the use of human embryonic cells, the use of gene therapy, the spinal cord can and will regenerate and so it is only a question of time before these techniques make their way into humans. One of the most exciting discoveries was made by a Dr. Viscovi in Milan who found that there are cells called epitomal cells which were thought to only exist in again, in the child during gestation, because these cells are undifferentiated and they can become anything. Well, very recently, just two months ago these cells were found to exist in the adult in the ventricles of the brain, in the spinal cord and even in the skin. And this is tremendously exciting because the hope, the best hope for recovery now, is to biopsy these cells from your skin, from your hand for example, they could grow hundreds of thousands of cells in a petri dish and genetically instruct them to become neurons and axons. They would then be injected inside of the injury and they would become the nerves necessary to carry messages from the brain to the rest of the body. Now that would have been science fiction a few years ago, but it's here and it's happening and it doesn't matter whether it's an acute injury or a chronic injury. So I offer you the specific detail, not to give you a boring science lecture but to tell you there is very real tangible hope, very real hope...And one of the great advantages of this technique is that there is no danger of toxicity to the body or rejection by the immune system. And what I love about it is the body is healing itself. Taking cells from one part and using them in another area and I think that's some-how a beautiful design, rather than loading up the body with more chemicals and more drugs and more artificial agents."

"[I]t seems to me that this past century has accomplished two Civil Rights movements. First, the right for blacks and Hispanics and people from all different nationalities to take their place in the middle of society and that has been achieved at great cost. It is a tremendous struggle in America, but now we think nothing of walking into an office and finding that a black person is the president of the company instead of a janitor cleaning the hallways. And then we learned that the talent that blacks and Hispanics have, always had, their intelligence, dedication and willingness to work is no less than anybody else. They have been able to persevere and finally I think we have really overcome tremendous amounts of prejudice, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. The second great Civil Rights movement was equality for women. It started at the end of the last century. Women finally got to vote. We've gotten all the way to the point now where women aren't expected to stay home and just be mothers and it's okay to be a single parent and it's okay to go out and pursue your ambition and your dreams. And that's been a very important breakthrough because there are so many areas where women are more talented and have more to offer than men do. And now we are beginning to see everybody working side by side in society and in the workplace. But, there remains one HUGE minority that is still terribly discriminated against. And that population is the disabled population. And that comprises 1/5 of the world's population. In the United States, for example, we have 54 million disabled people and the thing that's very difficult is when blacks and Hispanics and women were fighting for equal rights there was a level of discomfort. But nothing approaching what happens when "normal" people look at the disabled and are uncomfortable. That is a prejudice that they MUST overcome because we're not in a position to always look our very best or to feel our very best, or to be pleasing to the eye because we have suffered terrible debilitating diseases and injuries. But what's happening now is the kind of discrimination that is so bad and I want to tell you that it exceeds any prejudice that ever occurred before in the previous civil rights movements."

"When people project and understand that in an instant and as they grow older they face Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, MS, strokes, all the diseases of the brain and central nervous system, which will effect the entire population as we get older. People begin to realize hey I'm lucky, I'm just temporarily not disabled. So, the point is we're beginning to see equality, we're beginning to see new opportunities and that brings me to the other part we've already talked about, acceptance and the other part is denial. And what I mean by that, and everybody has to work it out for themselves, my point of view may not be your point of view, so please hold onto your belief and let me hold onto my belief. But my belief is that there is nothing we can't accomplish if we set our minds to it."

"I've always been a practical person, not one to waste time pursuing unrealistic goals or dreams. But today's dreams can soon become tomorrow's reality in biomedical research. Scientists studying how the brain's cells and chemicals develop, interact, and communicate with the rest of the body have been making strides in alleviating the suffering of patients with Alzheimer's, strokes, Parkinson's, and MS, as well as brain and spinal cord injuries. Only recently researchers have dis-covered that stem cells, which have the ability to adapt to any environmentt in the body, will probably be the most important factor in curing all of these conditions. For example, in order to repair the damaged spinal cord, stem cells can be extracted from the ventricles of the brain or from bone marrow and genetically engineered to become nerve tissue. Highly successful experiments on mice have shown that when these transformed stem cells are transferred into the site of the injury, they apparently understand that their mission is to replace the damaged circuitry, which causes significant functional recovery. Mice that have had their spinal cords completely transected have been able to walk confidently across tightropes and climb rope ladders after this treatment. You would think that these breakthroughs would be a cause for celebration throughout the disabled community. In scientific terms, we are very close to achieving the impossible; in practical terms, we have a long way to go. But it is very disheartening to hear a leading researcher announce, "give us a hundred million dollars and we can cure Parkinson's"; or, "if we raise 300 million dollars, we can find a cure for paralysis in 5 years instead of 15." The idea of spending 15 more years in a wheelchair being fed, dressed, and washed by others would be tolerable if the scientists were still in the dark and there was no hope of recovery. I think most disabled people would agree with me that it is very difficult to cope psychologically with the stark reality that our future now depends mostly on money."

"[W]hile the budget for research is negotiated annually on Capitol Hill, Alzheimer's has crippled 4 million Americans. This disease alone costs our nation 100 billion dollars every year and this number is expected to rise dramatically as baby boomers continue to age. Parkinson's afflicts nearly half a million Americans and costs us at least 6 million a year. Another half million Americans suffer strokes each year, costing more than 30 million in medical treatment, rehabilitation, and long-term care. Diabetes afflicts nearly 16 million people. It is the leading cause of blindness, kidney disease, and limb amputations; and it costs our nation between 90 and 140 billion dollars a year."

"Sitting in a chair for more than 4 years now has given me plenty of time to think about many of the distorted and irrational values in our society. For example, all the researchers now agree that the damaged spinal cord can and will be repaired. But, they caution, recovery will only benefit the fittest. This means that the patient must exercise diligently to prevent muscle atrophy, and the loss of bone density and cardiovascular capacity. Special equipment ranging from electrodes that stimulate muscle groups, tilt tables that allow people to stand and bear weight, exercise bicycles, and treadmill therapy, which enables even a quadriplegic to walk while suspended in a harness, are all available. When the cure comes and signals from the brain once again reach the body, individuals who have kept in shape will be able to be rehabilitated relatively quickly and will no longer need payments from their insurance company. But no company will pay for this proactive therapy which would save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run. So most spinal cord injury victims simply deteriorate while they continue to fight for basic quality of life coverage. Meanwhile, the CEOs of many insurance companies are making salaries in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars a year. How much profit is reasonable and justifiable? The same distortion of values is evident in entertainment, sports, and politics. Why do studios pay some of their biggest stars 20 million dollars a picture? Does even the most gifted athlete deserve 91 million dollars over 7 years to swing a bat and catch a baseball? Why is it that so many of our elected officials end up in office primarily because they have been able to outspend their opponents? At the other end of the spectrum, why has the NIH since its inception in 1940 had to plead incessantly for enough money to battle every disease in the encyclopedia?"

"The prosperity that we've enjoyed in the 90's has spawned a new breed of individuals who have amassed tremendous fortunes at a very young age. Many of them have reaped the rewards of a stock market that seems to have no upper limit. Others have moved swiftly into the fast lane of the information superhighway, and achieved a net worth in the billions long before their 40th birthday. Often they literally don't know what to do with that much money. Unfortunately, philanthropy is not something many of them perceive as an important responsibility of the wealthy. While of course there are a number of notable exceptions, too many of these young billionaires become obsessed with privacy and are more likely to build half a dozen homes in different parts of the world than to give back to society. In the early years of this century, the notion of what it meant to be a "gentleman" informed the actions of the very rich - the Vanderbilts, Astors, Rockefellers, Carnegies, and the like. They too built "cottages" in Newport, and enjoyed their yachts. But they also created foundations, endowed universities, built hospitals and libraries, and donated land for public use. I don't think it's a wild stretch of the imagination to believe that if they knew that 300 million dollars would cure paralysis in 5 years instead of 15, they would have reached for their checkbooks. But we must not wallow in nostalgia for the Gilded Age, when in fact, there is so much potential in the present. Ten corporations could each give 30 million dollars without any undue hardship. When people ask me what are my hopes and dreams for the new Millennium, my answer is I hope technology will not diminish genuine human contact and compassion. I still believe that when people really make the effort to understand each other, the possibilities are limitless. The solutions to the problems we will face in the 21st century --- such as overpopulation, the environment, education, and disease --- will only be achieved by every one of us doing our part. We must appeal to the government, the private sector, venture capitalists, corporations of all sizes, and every individual who can only afford to give 5 dollars to help further the cause. You in the media can lead the way by creating awareness and affecting public opinion. In the last hundred years, we invented the automobile, the airplane, and weapons of mass destruction. We journeyed to the moon and built shiny new cities throughout the country. We concerned ourselves with material success, convenience, and a higher standard of living. Now it's time for America to take care of its own. The life expectancy for Americans has practically doubled over the course of this century. Now it is our responsibility to ensure that from cradle to grave, these years are ones of quality and productivity, not pain and suffering. The time is now, at the dawn of a new Millennium."

"For the record, I am a C-2 ventilator-dependent quadriplegic, which means that I am paralyzed from the shoulders down and unable to breathe on my own. For the last 7 years, I have not been able to eat, wash, go to the bathroom, or get dressed by myself. Some people are able to accept living with a severe disability. I am not one of them, and that is why I have a keen interest in research and am deeply disturbed by unreasonable attempts to block scientific progress. The fact that the House of Representatives banned cloning last year without careful deliberation makes the Senate debate a matter of great urgency."

"Today, 100 million Americans suffer from serious or currently incurable diseases. Fifty-four million Americans are disabled. Our Government is supposed to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Beyond that, we have a moral responsibility to help others. Time is absolutely critical. If the Government forces scientists' attempt to make adult stem cells behave like embryonic stem cells, they might waste 5 years or more and fail. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands will have died. Why do we need therapeutic cloning? As a layman, several important reasons come to mind. One, implantation of human embryonic stem cells is not safe unless they contain the patient's own DNA. Two, efforts, to repair central nervous system disorders may need to recapitulate the process of fetal development, and that could only be accomplished by human embryonic stem cells. Three, therapeutic cloning is done without fertilizing an egg. It can be strictly regulated. If we also enforce an absolute ban on reproductive cloning, we will not slide down the dreaded slippery slope into moral and ethical chaos. Any powerful new technology comes with the possibility for abuse. But when we decide that the benefit to society is worth the risk, we take every possible precaution and go forward. The unfertilized eggs that will be used for nucleus transplantation will never leave the laboratory and will never be implanted in a womb. But if we do not make this research legal, if we do not use Government funding and oversight, it will happen privately, dangerous, unregulated and uncontrolled. And our country is about to lose its preeminence in science and medicine. We took a giant step backward in the 1970's when the NIH was not allowed to fund its in vitro research until an advisory commission could be formed to consider the issue. In the meantime, there was rapid progress in England, and the first test tube baby was born in 1978. For purely political reasons, we did not succeed and so far, 177,000 children have been conceived in 400 facilities around the country."

"Today, human trials to defeat Parkinson's are underway in Sweden. In Israel, macrophages, scavenger cells that eat debris in the body, are being used to repair the damaged spinal cord within 2 weeks of injury. The first human subject was a 19-year-old girl from Colorado. Last week, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom passed legislation permitting research on cloned human embryos for the second time. Those are not rogue nations behaving irresponsibly. They are allies, no less moral than we are."

"If you believe in the slippery slope here, it means that our entire society is perched on the slippery slope. It means that regulation has no value whatsoever, and that is not true. Now, there are always consequences. We allow 16-year-olds to get driver's licenses, and a lot of them have accidents - but do we rescind the permission to drive a car at 16? No."

"[J]ust on a daily basis, the Government is saying to people that, yes, there is a threat of terror, but fly and go to the theater and live your life and take that risk, because every day, you hear about fighter escorts having to take some airplane back to the airport because there was another bomb threat. People are boarding airplanes, passing security checkpoints, and then found to be carrying dangerous material - but still we go on. So yes, you take a risk that somebody somewhere could get involved in creating a human out of reproductive cloning, but it is not at all likely, and to be afraid of pursuing therapeutic cloning is really going to be reprehensible, because you cannot use embryonic stem cells for therapy without being able to use therapeutic cloning — it will not work."

"I need to object, and that is that, Senator, you insist on separating therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells. However, in my own case, I require re-myelination of nerves. That means replacing the conductive coat of fat, myelin, that allows electricity to come down, currents from the brain to the central nervous system for function. At the moment, only embryonic stem cells have the potential to do that, and experiments are being done now in larger animals demonstrating that."

"[A] scientist at Washington University, Dr. John McDonald, whom I have been working with says that there is no way he would inject stem cells without being able to use my own DNA for safety reasons. So without the ability to use my own DNA, without that somatic cell transfer, I am out of luck. The other thing is to please remember that therapeutic cloning, nucleus transplantation, is done with unfertilized eggs. You keep referring to destroying an embryo. I think that destroying an embryo is what happens when the leftovers from fertility clinics are thrown out. We can agree that they go to the garbage routinely. But to say that an unfertilized egg has the same status, I believe is incorrect, and I think that this is the line of research that holds so much promise and can also get us around the ethical quandary that we keep putting ourselves in. We are talking about an unfertilized egg that will never leave the lab, that will never be implanted in a womb, and that can be regulated. And it is crucial for research."

"[N]ever in the history of science have we been given such a gift of being able to use cells that can become any tissue or cell type in the body for the purpose of healing. I think that if you do not have the combination of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cells, you are going to be condemning a lot of people to unnecessary and death. If I look around at what else is going on, for years just in the spinal cord community, there has been research on growth factors and Schwann cells, and there have been efforts to stop protein inhibitor, but they have not yet shown the same promise that the embryonic stem cells do, and at the moment, in two places, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California at Irvine, researchers have been conducting very successful experiments using human embryonic stem cells in animal models in both the acute and chronic phases and getting recovery. Of course, they are going to have to move to the higher animal forms before humans, but the promise is absolutely extraordinary, and I cannot think of any other kind of therapy that would be as effective and as promising as this is. And when I read articles or hear people say that the promise of human embryonic stem cells is dubious, I am very disturbed, because the only reason they get to say that is because the NIH has not been allowed to spend a single dollar on embryonic stem cell research. They have a budget now of $25 billion, and yet, because of lack of guidelines and because of the restrictions that have been imposed on the NIH so far, not one human embryonic stem cell project has been federally funded. That is why you are seeing such slow progress. And if we continue that way, I am going to be in this wheelchair for a long time that I do not need to be, and others like me."

"If nucleus transplantation, aka therapeutic cloning, is banned, it will be a tremendous setback for science, and it will be indefinitely ... it will indefinitely prolong the suffering of hundreds of millions around the world, who are afflicted with wide variety of diseases and disabilities."

"I work with Dr. John McDonald at Washington University in St. Louis, and he is a very knowledgeable researcher on (Inaudible) stem cells, and a few years ago he said to me that in order to cure my particular condition, which is demyelination of nerves in a very small area of the spinal cord, right at the second cervical vertebrae, that if you imagine the rubber coating around a wire that allows conductivity of electricity, the same thing as with nerves, myelin is like that rubber coating. It's a fatty substance that if it comes off of the nerves, then signals do not go from the brain down to the spinal cord as required. However, it is possible, and he's demonstrated this as graphic(?) as possible, to re-myelinate. Now, a few years ago, he said, we would be willing to inject human embryonic stem cells into you and hope for the best. But hoping for the best is a very dangerous proposition for people with spinal cord injuries because our spinal cord injury affects every organ in the body, and the most serious side effect is that it severely compromises the immune system, so spinal cords patients, particularly with high level injuries like mine, are prone first to pneumonia, which I've had at least five times since my injury, many patients often die from that. Also, it compromises the cardiovascular system, compromises the digestive tract, the ... your whole bowel-bladder-sexual function, skin integrity and also bone density, so that osteoporosis becomes a very ... a very critical factor. So literally he said to me that the immunosuppression that would be required just to inject 30million human embryonic stem cells from an anonymous donor might kill me. And now, he would be unwilling as a doctor, because of the ethics involved that a doctor is ethically bound to give his patients the best possible treatment, he would not inject me with embryonic stemcells unless we go the other route, which is therapeutic cloning- taking an egg, removing the nucleus, taking DNA from my skin and deriving stem cells from that, which would be injected in a manner that would probably not be rejected by my immune system. So my future, and others would agree, many scientists would agree, my future, in terms of being able to recover will depend on some way of delivering stem cells without compromising my immune system and therapeutic cloning, which would use my DNA is the best hope."

"[Y]ou have to understand that therapeutic cloning is a very nascent technology that's not ready for use in humans. But knowing that it will not . . . provided our scientists are allowed to go ahead with the research, it really shouldn't take that long before they're ready for humans. However, knowing that there is a better technology out there than just using embryonic stemcells, he as a doctor feels, given the immune rejection problem for people with spinal cord injuries, he's not going to go ahead, as he had planned to. There was a plan to actually use embryonic stem cells as soon as it would be allowed by the FDA. He is not going to do that until therapeutic cloning gets to the point where it could be applied to humans. And I just want to make one other very quick comment and that is in England, just a month ago, Dr. Ann Bishop, who works with the tissue engineering corporation over there, was able to take mouse embryonic stem cells that derived . . . had been made obviously therapeutic cloning, and they turned those cells into tissue that is applied to the lungs, to deficient cell types or cell tissues in the lungs, and said, have already reported, I guess it's public knowledge, that they feel they are now ready to do it in humans, so the idea that it would be decades before you could get to human application, I think that is one example I'm giving you right now of the fact that that's not true. I can give you another example. Doctor Oswald Stewart, of the Reeve Research Center, UC Irvine has said that you could probably get to the use of therapeutic cloning in humans within about three to five years. So I absolutely dispute the time line that's been put up before."

"On the other hand, you have to understand that our allies are not rogue nations. The U.K., Australia, Canada, Singapore, Israel, India, these are just some of the countries that have already passed therapeutic cloning. In fact, England passed it twice. The House of Lords considered it, passed it, the pro-life groups objected to it, they took time to listen to those groups and then they passed it a second time. And therapeutic cloning is allowed with strict government oversight. And to say that those countries are less moral than we are, I think is hubris on our part that's out of control."

"I believe, throughout history, there has been common agreement in societies around the world that the life results because of the union of male and female. Whether it's done in a test tube, or whether it's done through intercourse. And fertilized embryos in clinics are still the union, result of the union of male and female. Therapeutic cloning takes an egg that is not fertilized, and is left in the cellular stage, in the very early stages, about three to five, seven days, then the nucleus is removed and the DNA from a patient. Either male or female can be put into it. Now, that is an aberrant life form. If you were to take it further and implant it, then only insane people would want to do that, in my opinion. But considering the fact that they're talking ... you're talking about the difference of life as we've understood it for hundreds of thousands of years, versus a collection of cells that will never become a human being, and I don't even believe deserves a status of the word embryo. It could be called a pseudo-embryo, it could be called, you know, some other name should come up from it, because just like test tube babies scared people before, the buzzword embryo scares people today. Cloning scares people today, but this is simply a manipulation of cells that are not equivalent to life as we've always known it."

"He was the human voice that changed attitudes. It's one thing for scientists to say 'we know we can do this', but Christopher put all this into a real-life perspective. It's people like Christopher we desperately want to help."

"It is sad that he did not live long enough to see the full benefits of the research for which he campaigned."

"He was put on this Earth for ... a lot of reasons. He wasn't just here to be an actor. He was Superman."

"Christopher Reeve is Superman, right here, right now... Reeve shows us the power, the possibilities and the results of a fierce and persistent commitment to growth and development. With God's help, Reeve is Superman because: 1. He survived the horse riding accident and challenged himself physically during countless months of painful physical therapy. 2. Because he remained committed to his role as a loving husband and doting father 3. Because he kept hope alive in the face of injury and paralysis that can destroy all hope-in the face of having to depend on his wife and many others to feed, wash, change, move and carry him to the doctor. 4. Because he came to the conclusion that God still had something for him to do... Christopher Reeve turned his focus away from his paralysis and began figuring out how he could live afresh. Reeve decided that a lot of people might like to hear his story. Instead of limiting the communication of his story to letters, books and videos subject to edit, Reeve chose the lecture circuit. That meant showing up in public, allowing the public to gawk at his incapacity, talking about his condition and sharing lessons learned. Thus, Christopher Reeve has become Superman for real."

"Christopher was a hero to many people. We will continue in his honour to be steadfast in our goal of finding treatments and cures for paralysis."

"Christopher Reeve has done an amazing job promoting responsible stem-cell research across the world."

"Obama paid tribute to the late actor Christopher Reeve, who emerged as an advocate for embryonic stem cell research after he was paralysed in a horseriding accident. He said Reeve dreamed of being able to walk again, adding: "Christopher did not get that chance. But if we pursue this research, maybe one day - maybe not in our lifetime, or even in our children's lifetime - but maybe one day, others like him might.""

"Reeve "appropriately brought a sense of urgency to this issue," said Perry, head of the research coalition, which favors stem cell science. "On Capitol Hill he was such a highly regarded figure and was so focused on the message.""

"He put a [human]] face on the dreams. He used his star power as a celebrity for a great good that transcends anything that most of us will ever achieve."

"He was able to inspire hope in patients with diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer, Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease ... tragic and life-threatening conditions that face tens of millions of Americans."

"In a talk sponsored by the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group, actor Christopher Reeve said science, not religion, should drive the debate over stem cell research. Social and religious conservatives have robbed American scientists of their chance to play a leading role in the promising field of stem cell research, actor and writer Christopher Reeve said during a visit to the medical school in April. “We’re giving away our pre-eminence in science and medicine,” he said. “We’re going to lose incredibly valuable time. “When matters of public policy are being decided, no religion should have a seat at the table—that is what is provided for in the Constitution,” Reeve said. Yet religious conservatives, including the Pope, he said, “have an undue influence in the debate.” Because of their plasticity—their ability to differentiate into any cell in the human body—stem cells “have unlimited potential to cure disease,” Reeve told the crowd that filled the auditorium of the Anylan Center for Medical Research and Education. Reeve also hopes that stem cell research will lead to a cure for paralysis such as his, the result of a 1995 riding accident. In a talk sponsored by the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group, Reeve criticized President Bush’s order of August 9, 2001, restricting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to only 64 extant cell lines. (Last May, National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., acknowledged that only 11 of those lines were eligible for federal research funds.) Reeve suggested that the decision made no ethical sense in light of Bush’s objection to using embryos for research. “Those lines were derived from leftover embryos from infertility clinics. Did he suddenly develop a new morality effective August 10th?” Reeve noted that, although typically about a third of embryos are discarded as medical waste, even vocal opponents of using embryos for research have never suggested banning in vitro fertilization. “They know very well that you can’t go to a couple and say, ‘You can’t have a child this way.’”"

"He was one of the leading figures who encouraged debate on the subject of human embryonic stem-cell research. We will miss his contribution."

"While his fame originally lay with his acting, his efforts in support of stem-cell research since the horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him quadraplegic have deeply affected friends and commentators. Reeve became a vocal advocate for this research field. In stem cells, he saw a powerful tool being hampered by US policy, a tool that promised potential therapies, not just to heal himself, but to treat a host of medical conditions in others."

"Reeve came to the stem-cell debate when the US was considering outlawing therapeutic cloning, a technique where stem cells are harvested from surplus fertilized eggs in fertility clinics. Such embryonic stem cells, it is thought, can be turned into any of the hundreds of cell types in the body. To its supporters, few medical technologies have held more promise, as such stem cells could potentially be used to replace damaged and diseased cells anywhere in the body. To its critics – and in Washington, that meant many Republicans and the religious right – the creation of embryos is morally repugnant. Reeve saw the resistance as a challenge. With an eye on the electorate, the Bush administration imposed strict controls on therapeutic cloning, declaring that, while private institutions could do whatever they wanted, federal funds could only be used to research stem cells created before 2001. Without the full weight of federal funding behind it, Reeve and many scientists felt stem cell research had been scuppered. He set up the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation to fund some of the best research into therapies for paralysis, but the $15 million a year the foundation dedicated to research was just a fraction of what the US National Institutes of Health could have paid for, if the Bush administration had allowed it."

"If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000"

"In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialize, and exploit every last bit of the planet—a trend that would inevitably lead to a collapse of the life-support systems upon which civilization depends."

"Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people."

"A series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly grimmer…. The ozone hole… acid rain…. Three hundred million people have starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines weren’t as large as agriculturists thought they would be… due to the spread of… Green Revolution technology into the poor countries…. What makes us nervous right now is that we’re faced with again having to do something desperate to increase our food production greatly.... In 1965 we knew exactly how to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough—Today we have nothing left to deploy—that’s very scary.... As a species we’re not able to live on our income; we’re living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural soils are being destroyed, water is being overpumped, and our biodiversity, our life support system—we’re already far beyond what we can support."

"The debate regarding which individual factor, among the three key factors producing the environmental crisis, causes more damage - the size of the human population on the planet, excessive consumption of resources or unequal/ unjust distribution of resources among countries [the wealthier countries consume much more resources than poorer countries] - is like a debate about which contributes more to a triangle, the base or the ribs of the triangle. You can not separate the three factors. If we analyze the numbers over a relatively longer time interval, we will conclude that the size of the population has a bigger impact than consumption. On the other hand, consumption and unequal distribution are also important aspects. If we do not change these three factors all at the same time, the quality of our life will change dramatically. Today humanity is delivering a serious blow to nature, but it is clear that nature will deliver the final blow."

"If everyone consumed resources at the US level – which is what the world aspires to – you will need another four or five Earths."

"As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’."

"To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men. I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable."

"The evidence we have is that toxics reduce the intelligence of children, and members of the first heavily influenced generation are now adults. The first empirical evidence we are dumbing down Homo sapiens were the – and the resultant . On the other hand, toxification may solve the population problem, since sperm counts are plunging."

"Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources."

"Life has now entered a . This is probably the most serious environmental problem, because the loss of a species is permanent, each of them playing a greater or lesser role in the living systems on which we all depend . The species extinctions that define the current crisis are, in turn, based on the massive disappearance of their component populations, mostly since the 1800s. The massive losses that we are experiencing are being caused, directly or indirectly, by the activities of Homo sapiens. They have almost all occurred since our ancestors developed agriculture, some 11,000 y ago. At that time, we numbered about 1 million people worldwide; now there are 7.7 billion of us, and our numbers are still rapidly growing. As our numbers have grown, humanity has come to pose an unprecedented threat to the vast majority of its living companions."

"Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation - it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals - not consuming more junk."

"The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic.... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything.... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else.... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland.... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources.... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably.... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality."

"Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality—But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control."

"Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water."

"The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated."

"The American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened the loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of an aeroplane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove ten, or twenty, or fifty, and at some point there will be a catastrophic failure and the plane will fall from the sky. Insects are the rivets that keep ecosystems functioning...In Paul Ehrlich's analogy we may be close to the point where the wings fall off."

"I'm a songwriter first, have always been, and probably always will be. Making the demo is a natural product of writing a song; after that, I'm happy to hear other people do it in other ways."

"The song is the center; the song is the key. If you don't have a good song you don't have anything by my value."

"Tonight you're mine completely, You give your love so sweetly Tonight the light of love is in your eyes, But will you love me tomorrow?"

"I'd like to know that your love Is love I can be sure of, So tell me now and I won't ask again, Will you still love me tomorrow?"

"All you have to do is touch my hand To show me you understand And something happens to me. That's some kind of wonderful."

"I want to be your lover But your friend is all I've stayed. I'm only halfway to paradise, So near, yet so far away."

"My tears are fallin' 'Cause you've taken her away. And though it really hurts me so, There's something that I've gotta say.Take good care of my baby. Please don't ever make her blue. Just tell her that you love her. Make sure you're thinking of her In everything you say and do."

"Everybody's doin' a brand new dance now. Come on baby, do the locomotion. I know you'll get to like it if you give it a chance now. Come on baby, do the locomotion.My little baby sister can do it with ease; It's easier than learning your ABC's. So come on, come on do the locomotion with me."

"Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains And they ain't the kind that you can see Woh these chains of love got a hold on me yeah."

"I'll never let you see The way my broken heart is hurting me. I've got my pride and I know how to hide All my sorrow and pain. I'll do my crying in the rain."

"What should I write? What can I say? How can I tell you how much I miss you? The weather here has been as nice as it can be, Although it doesn't really matter much to me. For all the fun I'll have while you're so far away, It might as well rain until September."

"When this old world starts getting me down And people are just too much for me to face, I climb way up to the top of the stairs And all my cares just drift right into space. On the roof, it's peaceful as can be And there the world below can't bother me. Let me tell you now."

"One fine day, you'll look at me And you will know our love was, meant to be. One fine day, you're gonna want me for your girl."

"Hey girl I want you to know I'm gonna miss you so much if you go. And hey girl I tell you no lie, Something deep inside of me's going to die If you say so long, if this is goodbye."

"He gets up each morning and he goes downtown Where everyone's his boss, And he's lost in an angry land. He's a little man. But then he comes uptown Each evening to my tenement. Uptown where folks don't have to pay much rent. And when he's there with me. He can see that he's everything. The man is tall, he don't crawl. He's a king."

"When my friends told me you had someone new I didn't believe a single word was true. I showed them all I had a faith in you I just kept on sayingOh, no, not my baby Oh, no, not my sweet baby You're not like those other guys Who lead you on and tell you lies."

"There's alot of things I want, a lot of things that I'd like to be. But girl, I don't foresee a rags-to-riches story for me. There's just one little dream I've got to come true; There's just one round I've gotta win, I can't be a loser with you. Baby, baby, once in my life, let me get what I want, Girl, don't let me down! Just once in my life, let me hold on to one good thing I found!"

"I think I'm going back To the things I learned so well In my youth. I think I'm returning to The days when I was young enough To know the truth."

"In the midst of all my darkness, baby You came along to guide me. You took pity on a lonely man When you said you'd stand beside me. I'll never forget you Or what you've done. I'll never turn my back on you for anyone.I've got so much love to give you. Baby, I've got so much love to give you. Girl, there's more than enough to last a whole life through, And it's all for you."

"Looking out on the morning rain, I used to feel so uninspired. And when I knew I had to face another day, Lord, it made me feel so tired. Before the day I met you, life was so unkind. Your love was the key to my peace of mind.'Cause you make me feel. You make me feel, You make me feel like A natural woman (woman)."

"When my soul was in the lost and found, You came along to claim it. I didn't know just what was wrong with me Till your kiss helped me name it. Now I'm no longer doubtful of what I'm living for, Cause if I make you happy I don't need to do more."

"The local rock group down the street Is trying hard to learn their song. They serenade the weekend squire Who just came out to mow his lawn. Another pleasant valley Sunday. Charcoal burning everywhere. Rows of houses that are all the same. And no one seems to care."

"Gotta make you love me the way you used to do Gotta get back the feeling and put wind in my sails And chart a course that gets me back to you, back to you. Oh, the lonely days, the lonely nights lookin' back in time. Time, don't run out on me."

"I feel the earth move under my feet I feel the sky tumbling down — tumbling down I feel my heart start to trembling Whenever you're around."

"So far away Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore? It would be so fine to see your face at my door. Doesn't help to know you're so far away."

"You've got to get up every morning with a smile on your face And show the world all the love in your heart The people gonna treat you better, You're gonna find, yes you will, That you're beautiful as you feel."

"If there's any answer, maybe love can end the madness Maybe not, oh, but we can only try."

"Way over yonder is a place I have seen In a garden of wisdom from some long ago dream."

"Way over yonder, that's where I'm bound."

"When you're down and troubled And you need some loving care And nothing, nothing is going right. Close your eyes and think of me And soon I will be there To brighten up even your darkest nights."

"You just call out my name And you know wherever I am I'll come running to see you again. Winter, spring, summer, or fall All you have to do is call And I'll be there, yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got a friend."

"Now ain't it good to know That you've got a friend When People can be so cold. They'll hurt you, kiss and desert you. And take your soul if you let them. Oh, but don't you let them."

"If you're out on the road, Feeling lonely, and so cold, All you have to do is call my name And I'll be there on the next train.Where you lead, I will follow Anywhere that you tell me to. If you need, you need me to be with you, I will follow where you lead."

"You can't talk to a man, with a shotgun in his hand."

"My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue An everlasting vision of the everchanging view A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold."

"He moved with some uncertainty, as if he didn't know Just what he was there for, or where he ought to go Once he reached for something golden hanging from a tree And his hand come down empty..."

"It seemed that he had fallen into someone's wicked spell And I wept to see him suffer, though I didn't know him well."

"It's going to take some time this time To get myself in shape. I really fell out of line this time, I really missed the gate. The birds on the telephone line, (next time) Are cryin' out to me, (next time) And I won't be so blind next time And I'll find some harmony."

"Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, And sometimes the blues just get a hold of you. Just when you thought you had made it, All around the block people will talk. But I want to give it all that I've got. I just don't want, I don't want to waste it."

"Green fields and rolling hills, Room enough to do what we will. Sweet dreams of yestertime Are running though my mind Of a place I left behind. Been so long, I can't remember when, I've been to Canaan and I wanna go back again."

"Only love is real. Everything else illusion Adding to the confusion of the way we connive At being alive. Tracing a line till we can define The thing that allows us to feel. Only love is real."

"Now and forever, you are a part of me And the memory cuts like a knife. Didn't we find the ecstasy, didn't we share the daylight When you walked into my life?Now and forever, I'll remember All the promises still unbroken. And think about all the words between us That never needed to be spoken."

"And it's too late, baby, now it's too late Though we really did try to make it Somethin' inside has died and I can't hide And I just can't fake it."

"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science."

"The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry."

"We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction."

"Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. There is certainly no single remedy for this condition and I am offering no panacea. But it seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."

"We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow."

"The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics."

"Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening."

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."

"Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows."

"If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces."

"To many of us, this sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the color and beauty and interest of bird life, is sufficient cause for sharp regret. To those who have never known such rewarding enjoyment of nature, there should yet remain a nagging and insistent question: If this "rain of death" has produced so disastrous an effect on birds, what of other lives, including our own?"

"In our modern world nothing may be taken for granted-not even the spring songs that herald the return of the birds."

"I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives."

"Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life."

"The problem I dealt with in Silent Spring is not an isolated one. The excessive and ill-advised use of chemical pesticides is merely one part of a sorry whole-the reckless pollution of our living world with harmful and dangerous substances. Until very recently, the average citizen assumed that "someone" was looking after these matters and that some little understood but confidently relied upon safeguards stood like shields between his person and any harm. Now he has experienced, from several different directions, a rather rude shattering of these beliefs."

"I believe that only in that atmosphere of intellectual freedom can we solve the problems before us now."

"To me, Dr. Albert Schweitzer is the one truly great individuals our modern times have produced."

"As I look back through history I find a parallel. I ask you to recall the uproar that followed Charles Darwin's announcement of his theories of evolution. The concept of man's origin from pre-existing forms was hotly and emotionally denied, and the denials came not only from the lay public but from Darwin's peers in science. Only after many years did the concepts set forth in The Origin of Species become firmly established. Today, it would be hard to find any person of education who would deny the facts of evolution. Yet so many of us deny the obvious corollary: that man is affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species to which he is related by evolutionary ties."

"Fishes and plankton, whales and squids, birds and sea turtles, all are linked by unbreakable ties to certain kinds of water—to warm water or cold water, to clear or turbid water, to water rich in phosphates or in silicates."

"The sharpest peaks of the Ridge are the cluster of islets known as the Rocks of St. Paul, near the equator. The entire cluster of half a dozen islets is not more than a quarter of a mile across, and their rocky slopes drop off at so sheer an angle that water more than half a mile deep lies only a few feet off shore."

"The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth."

"The 1950's have comprised an exciting decade in the science of the sea. During this period a manned vehicle has descended to the deepest hole in the ocean floor. During the 'fifties, also, the crossing of the entire Arctic basin was accomplished by submarines traveling under the ice. Many new features of the unseen floor of the sea have been described, including new mountain ranges that now appear to be linked with others to form the longest and mightiest mountains of the earth-a continuous chain encircling the globe. Deep, hidden rivers in the sea, subsurface currents with the volume of a thousand Mississippis, have been found. During the International Geophysical Year, 60 ships from 40 nations, as well as hundreds of stations on islands and seacoasts, co-operated in an enormously fruitful study of the sea."

"Although man's record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man's ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naive. In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem-what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed in all the earth's history, the by-products of atomic fission. The stark problem that faces him is whether he can dispose of these lethal substances without rendering the earth uninhabitable. No account of the sea today is complete unless it takes note of this ominous problem. By its very vastness and its seeming remoteness, the sea has invited the attention of those who have the problem of disposal, and with very little discussion and almost no public notice, at least until the late 'fifties, the sea has been selected as a "natural" burying place for the contaminated rubbish and other "low-level wastes" of the Atomic Age."

"The truth is that disposal has proceeded far more rapidly than our knowledge justifies. To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time."

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."

"F or the globe as a whole, the ocean is the great regulator, the great stabilizer of temperatures. It has been described as 'a savings bank for solar energy, receiving deposits in seasons of excessive insolation and paying them back in seasons of want. Without the ocean, our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature."

"Day by day and season by season, the ocean dominates the world's climate."

"In our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate."

"Activities in the nonhuman world also reflect the warming of the Arctic-the changed habits and migrations of many fishes, birds, land mammals, and whales."

"The fifteen years that I spent in fishery and wildlife conservation work with the *Government have taken me into certain places where few other women have been."

"Tradition is important in the Government, but fortunately I had conspirators who were willing to help me shatter precedent. But among my male colleagues who had to sign the papers, the thought of one woman on a ship with some fifty men was unthinkable. After much soul searching, it was decided that maybe two women would be all right, so I arranged with a friend, who was also a writer, to go with me."

"There is something deeply impressive about the night sea as one experiences it from a small vessel far from land. When I stood on the afterdeck on those dark nights, on a tiny man-made island of wood and steel, dimly seeing the great shapes of waves that rolled about us, I think I was conscious as never before that ours is a water world, dominated by the immensity of the sea...."

"There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life-we are never bored. We can't be. There is always something new to be investigated. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one..."

"The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for the scientists. They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top-or the sea-or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed."

"I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth."

"As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life."

"Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity."

"I believe it is important for women to realize that the world of today threatens to destroy much of that beauty that has immense power to bring us a healing release from tension. Women have a greater intuitive understanding of such things. They want for their children not only physical health but mental and spiritual health as well. I bring these things to your attention tonight because I think your awareness of them will help, whether you are practicing journalists, or teachers, or librarians, or housewives and mothers."

"We see the destructive trend on a national scale in proposals to invade the national parks with commercial schemes such as the building of power dams. The parks were placed in trust for all the people, to preserve for them just such recreational and spiritual values as I have mentioned. Is it the right of this, our generation, in its selfish materialism, to destroy these things because we are blinded by the dollar sign? Beauty-and all the values the derive from beauty-are not measured and evaluated in terms of the dollar."

"A preoccupation with the wonder and beauty of the earth has strongly influenced the course of my life."

"There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, in the ebb and flow of the tides; in the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

"Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy-no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials."

"This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits."

"The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth's vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species-man-acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible."

"Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time."

"The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped-500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience."

"Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides.""

"It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray. All this has been risked-for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them. We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of overproduction?"

"It is a sobering fact...that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb."

"Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do not use it. We train ecologists in our universities and even employ them in our governmental agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the chemical death rain to fall as though there were no alternative, whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity could soon discover many more if given opportunity."

"Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?"

"It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potential for harm. We have subjected enormous numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem."

"Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life."

"It is an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged. When the public protests, confronted with some obvious evidence of damaging results of pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts."

"Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song."

"These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes — nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil — all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides.""

"For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the Salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in a stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. We poison the gnats in a lake and the poison travels from link to link of the food chain and soon the birds of the lake margins become its victims. We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life — or death — that scientists know as ecology."

"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one "less traveled by"-offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make."

"To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right. This is a valid point of view."

"If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our "right to know," and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us."

"Now at last, as it has become apparent that the heedless and unrestrained use of chemicals is a greater menace to ourselves than to the targets, the river which is the science of biotic control flows again, fed by new streams of thought."

"Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life-with living populations and all their pressures and counter-pressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such life forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves. The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life-a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper."

"The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth."

"Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature; now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune-it may well be our final tragedy-that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself."

"Measured against the vast backdrop of geologic time, the whole era of man seems but a moment-but how portentous a moment!"

"Who could have foretold that this being, who walked upright and no longer lived in trees, who lurked in caves, hiding in fear from the great beasts who shared his world-who could have guessed that he would one day have in his hands the power to change the very nature of the earth-the of life and death over so many of its creatures? Who could have foretold that the brain that was developing behind those heavy brow ridges would allow him to accomplish things no other creature had achieved-but would not at the same time endow him with wisdom so to control his activities that he would not bring destruction upon himself?"

"Only a few centuries have passed since those pre-Columbian days, yet today our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars, but like the Norsemen and the Polynesians of old, lured by the very challenge of the unknown."

"In the western world our thinking has for many centuries been dominated by the Jewish-Christian concept of man's relation to nature, in which man is regarded as the master of all the earth's inhabitants. Out of this there easily grew the thought that everything on earth-animate or inanimate, animal, vegetable, or mineral-and indeed the earth itself-had been created expressly for man."

"But I am not certain that in spite of all our modern learning and sophistication, we have actually progressed far beyond the self-oriented philosophy of the Victorians. I fear that these ideas still lurk about, showing themselves boldly and openly at times, at oth-ers skulking about in the shadows of the subconscious."

"We still talk in terms of "conquest"-whether it be of the insect world or of the mysterious world of space. We still have not become mature enough to see ourselves as a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe, a universe that is distinguished above all else by a mysterious and wonderful unity that we flout at our peril."

"Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge."

"Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important, simply because of his new-found power to destroy it."

"I clearly remember that in the days before Hiroshima I used to wonder whether nature-nature in the broadest context of the word-actually needed protection from man. Surely the sea was inviolate and forever beyond man's power to change it. Surely the vast cycles by which water is drawn up into the clouds to return again to the earth could never be touched. And just as surely the vast tides of life-the migrating birds-would continue to ebb and flow over the continents, marking the passage of the seasons. But I was wrong. Even these things, that seemed to belong to the eternal verities, are not only threatened but have already felt the destroying hand of man."

"Our streams are fouled with an incredible assortment of wastes-domestic, chemical, radioactive, so that our planet, though dominated by seas that envelop three-fourths of its surface, is rapidly becoming a thirsty world."

"So nature does indeed need protection from man; but man, too, needs protection from his own acts, for he is part of the living world. His war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. His heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth, and in time return to him."

"What we are today represents an adjustment achieved over the millions and hundreds of millions of years."

"the distinguishing feature of man's activities is that they have almost always been undertaken from the narrow viewpoint of short-range gain, without considering either their impact on the earth or their long-range effect upon ourselves. They have been distinguished, also, by a curious unwillingness to be guided by the knowledge that is available in certain areas of science. I mean especially the knowledge of biologists, of ecologists, of geneticists, all of whom have special areas of competence that should allow them to predict the effect of our actions on living creatures, including, of course, man himself."

"This is an age that has produced floods of how-to-do-it books, and it is also an age of how-to-do-it science. It is, in other words, the age of technology, in which if we know how to do something, we do it without pausing to inquire whether we should."

"We know how to split the atom, and how to use its energy in peace and war, and so we proceed with preparations to do so, as if acting under some blind compulsion;"

"Instead of always trying to impose our will on Nature we should sometimes be quiet and listen to what she has to tell us. If we did so I am sure we would gain a new perspective on our own feverish lives. We might even see the folly and the madness of a world in which half of mankind is busily preparing to destroy the other half and to reduce our whole planet to radioactive ashes in the doing."

"But the stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. Your generation must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and a sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery-not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny. "In today already walks tomorrow.""

"After describing in detail the adverse reactions to Silent Spring of the farm bureaus in two Pennsylvania counties, the reporter continued: "No one in either county farm office who was talked to today had read the book, but all disapproved of it heartily.""

"I criticize the present methods because they are based on a rather low level of scientific thinking. We are capable of much greater sophistication in our solution of the problem."

"I would like to say that in Silent Spring I have never asked the reader to take my word. I have given him a very clear indication of my sources. I make it possible for him-indeed I invite him-to go beyond what I report and get the full picture. This is the reason for the 55 pages of references. You cannot do this if you are trying to conceal or distort or to present half truths."

"A penetrating observer of social problems has pointed out recently that whereas wealthy families once were the chief benefactors of the universities, now industry has taken over this role. Support of education is something no one quarrels with-but this need not blind us to the fact that research supported by pesticide manufacturers is not likely to be directed at discovering facts indicating unfavorable effects of pesticides."

"We see scientific societies acknowledging as "sustaining associates" a dozen or more giants of a related industry. When the scientific organization speaks, whose voice do we hear-that of science? or of the sustaining industry? It might be a less serious situation if this voice were always clearly identified, but the public assumes it is hearing the voice of science."

"What does it mean when we see a committee set up to make a supposedly impartial review of a situation, and then discover that the committee is affiliated with the very industry whose profits are at stake?"

"All of these things raise the question of the communication of scientific knowledge to the public. Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through?"

"here the tailoring-the screening of basic truth is done, not to suit a party line-but to accommodate to the short-term gain-to serve the gods of profit and production."

"Through your interest in plant life, your fostering of beauty, your alignment with constructive conservation causes, you promote that onward flow of life that is the essence of our world. This is a time when forces of a very different nature too often prevail-forces careless of life or deliberately destructive of it and of the essential web of living relationships."

"The battle for a sane policy for controlling unwanted species will be a long and difficult one. The publication of Silent Spring was neither the beginning nor the end of that struggle."

"The most hopeful sign is an awakening of strong public interest and concern. People are beginning to ask questions and to insist upon proper answers instead of meekly acquiescing in whatever spraying programs are proposed. This in itself is a wholesome thing."

"Above all, we must not be deceived by the enormous stream of propaganda that is issuing from the pesticide manufacturers and from industry-related-although ostensibly independent organizations."

"we are engaged in a grim experiment never before attempted. We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and in many cases cumulative in their effect. These exposures now begin at or before birth and-unless we change our methods-will continue through the lifetime of those now living. No one knows what the result will be, because we have no previous experience to guide us."

"What happens, then, when the public interest is pitted against large commercial interests? Those organizations wishing to plead for protection of the public interest do so under the peril of losing the tax-exempt status so necessary to their existence. The industry wishing to pursue its course without legal restraint is now actually subsidized in its efforts."

"The way is not made easy for those who would defend the public interest"

"There are other disturbing factors ... One is the growing interrelations between professional organizations and industry, and between science and industry."

"Another cause of concern is the increasing size and number of industry grants to the universities. On first thought, much support of education seems desirable, but on reflection we see that this does not make for unbiased research-it does not promote a truly scientific spirit. To an increasing extent, the man who commands the largest expense account-and who brings the largest grants to his university becomes an untouchable, with whom even the University president and trustees do not argue."

"As you listen to the present controversy about pesticides, I recommend that you ask yourself-Who speaks? And Why?"

"For we all are united in a common cause. It is a proud cause, which we may serve secure in the knowledge that the earth will be better for our efforts. It is a cause that has no end: there is no point at which we shall say, "Our work is finished." We build on the achievements of those who have gone before us; let us, in turn, build strong foundations for those who will take up the work when we must lay it down."

"Over the decades and the centuries, the scenes and the actors change. Yet the central theme remains-the greed and the shortsightedness of the few who would deprive the many of their rightful heritage. It is a theme supported by the false assurances that whatever is financially profitable is good for the nation and for mankind. These assurances were offered in the days of the timber barons and the land grabbers; they are heard today."

"If the crisis that now confronts us is even more urgent than those of the early years of the century-and I believe it is this is because of wholly new factors peculiar to our own time. These are, first of all, the phenomenal growth of the human population, threatening to over-run its own environment in a way that can bring only deep concern to thoughtful students of population problems. The second factor is a corollary of the first: that as people and their demands increase, there is a smaller share of the earth's resources for each of us to use and enjoy. There is less clean water, less uncontaminated air; there are fewer forests, fewer unspoiled wilderness areas. The third reason is the introduction of new and dangerous contaminants into soil, water, air, and the bodies of plants and animals as our new technology spreads its poisons and its discarded wastes over the land."

"we live in a time when change comes rapidly-a time when much of that change is, at least for long periods, irrevocable. This is what makes our own task so urgent. It is not often that a generation is challenged, as we today are challenged. For what we fail to do-what we let go by default, can perhaps never be done."

"I take courage, however, in the fact that the conservation effort has a broader base than ever before. There is more organized effort; there are many more individuals who are conscious of conservation problems and who are striving, in their own communities or on the national scene, to solve these problems."

"The contamination of the environment with harmful substances is one of the major problems of modern life. The world of air and water and soil supports not only the hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants, it supports man himself. In the past we have often chosen to ignore this fact. Now we are receiving sharp reminders that our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves."

"We have acquired technical skills on a scale undreamed of even a generation ago. We can do dramatic things and we can do them quickly; by the time damaging side effects are apparent it is often too late, or impossible, to reverse our actions."

"I should also like to see legislation, possibly at the state level, restricting the sale and use of pesticides at least to those capable of understanding the hazards and of following directions. To me it is shocking that these chemicals can be bought and applied by illiterate and even by mentally deficient persons. We place much more stringent restrictions on the sale of drugs which at least are not sprayed from powerful machines!"

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."

"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."

"I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused — a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love — then we wish for knowledge about the subject of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate."

"A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods. I always thought so myself; the Maine woods never seem so fresh and alive as in wet weather. Then all the needles on the evergreens wear a sheath of silver; ferns seem to have grown to almost tropical lushness and every leaf has its edging of crystal drops. Strangely colored fungi — mustard-yellow and apricot and scarlet — are pushing out of the leaf mold and all the lichens and the mosses have come alive with green and silver freshness."

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."

"I shall have to express a very deep conviction: that until we have courage to recognize cruelty for what it is—whether its victim is human or animal—we cannot expect things to be much better in the world. There can be no double standard. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts find delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity."

"All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort. (1954)"

"And so it is--we always think our problems are peculiar to us, and then finally discover how many others have gone through exactly the same thing. And much as I suffer during the writing itself, I begin to think it is easy for me compared with the agonies she relates! (1955)"

"She knew how to explain science to ordinary readers in a way that they could understand; she knew also that if you don't love a thing you won't save it, and her love for the natural world shines through everything she wrote."

"I certainly was unaware that the ocean globally was on the verge of cataclysmic decline, that the pristine seas I had known as a child were in danger of becoming Paradise Lost. I was not alone in not knowing. Rachel Carson, famous for her 1962 classic Silent Spring, 11 years earlier wrote in The Sea Around Us: "Eventually man...found his way back to the sea.... And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.""

"There is a long-standing debate within the environmental movement about its historical origins. Some point to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's seminal book Silent Spring and accounts of the first Earth Day in 1970. Depending on the author, either of these two events is hailed as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. With her groundbreaking book, Rachel Carson alerted postwar America about the unintended consequences of the chemical industry on the natural world-and inevitably humans-leading to the banning of DDT in the US."

"what is driving these declines? In 1962, three years before I was born, Rachel Carson warned us in her book Silent Spring that we were doing terrible damage to our planet. She would weep to see how much worse it has become. Insect-rich wildlife habitats such as hay meadows, marshes, heathland and tropical rainforests have been bulldozed, burned or ploughed to destruction on a vast scale. Soils have been degraded and rivers choked with silt and polluted with industrial and agricultural chemicals or drained dry from over-use. The problems with pesticides and fertilizers that Carson highlighted have become far more acute, with an estimated 3 million tonnes of pesticides now going into the global environment every year. In the US, the weight of pesticides applied has increased by 150 per cent since Silent Spring was published, while at the same time new pesticides have been introduced that are much more toxic to insects than any that existed in Carson's day. For example, the neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid is now the most widely used insecticide in the world, despite an EU-wide ban since 2018 brought on because of the harm it does to bees. Imidacloprid is about 7,000 times more toxic to bees than the insecticide DDT which was widely used in the 1960s and '70s. On top of all these pressures, wild insects now must cope with climate change, a phenomenon unrecognized in Carson's time."

"She was born in 1907 in the boom of the Industrial Age about 18 miles up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh, in the town of Springdale. From her bedroom window, she could see smoke billow from the stacks of the American Glue Factory, which slaughtered horses. The factory, the junkyard of its time, was located less than a mile away, down the gently sloping riverbank from the Carsons' four-room log cabin. Passers-by could watch old horses file up a covered wooden ramp to their death."

"Robin Wall Kimmerer says she admires Carson as a pioneering female scientist and one who “combined her knowledge with a sense of responsibility for that knowledge.”"

"It was Rachel Carson down in the dirt with DDT-contaminated worms. It was vividly descriptive prose, naturalist sketches, and, eventually, documentary photography and film seeking to awaken and inspire love for specific creatures and places-and, by extension, for creatures and places like them all over the world."

"I. F. Stone may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today's standards, the environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals. Galvanized by the 1962 publication of Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (the Deepwater Horizon disaster of its day), they launched a new kind of North American environmentalism, one far more confrontational than the gentlemen's conservationism of the past. In addition to the newly formed Friends of the Earth (created in 1969) and Greenpeace (launched in 1971), the movement also included groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, then an idealistic gang of scrappy scientists and lawyers determined to heed Rachel Carson's warnings. The group's unofficial slogan was, "Sue the bastards," and so they did. The EDF fought for and filed the original lawsuit that led to the U.S. ban on DDT as an insecticide, resulting in the revival of many species of birds, including the bald eagle."

"If we were adding CO₂ to the air more slowly, geophysical processes, like the weathering of rock, would come into play to counteract acidification. As it is, things are moving too fast for such slow-acting forces to keep up. As Rachel Carson once observed, referring to a very different but at the same time profoundly similar problem: "Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.""

"Certainly humans can be destructive and shortsighted; they can also be forward-thinking and altruistic. Time and time again, people have demonstrated that they care about what Rachel Carson called "the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures," and that they're willing to make sacrifices on those creatures' behalf. Alfred Newton described the slaughter that was occurring along the British coast; the result was the Act for the Preservation of Sea Birds. John Muir wrote about the damage being done in the mountains of California, and this led to the creation of Yosemite National Park. Silent Spring exposed the dangers posed by synthetic pesticides, and within a decade, most uses of DDT had been prohibited."

"With Silent Spring's appearance in 1962, Rachel Carson, the quiet and unassuming writer and marine biologist, made Americans think about their dependence on nature. Pesticide manufacturers, long seen as helping to control nature, raged at her attack. They assaulted Carson's book and also criticized her scientific facts and her character, called her a "hysterical woman.""

"Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is a seminal work of environmental justice thought. A female scientist writing in the early 1960s, Carson described the impact of pesticides on birdlife and the eco-system, offering an early shift in Western scientific thinking toward recognition that the earth is a living system, one in which human shortsightedness has consequences. This text informed many environmental activists, who organized the first Earth Day actions and instigated establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. It also informed early environmental justice activists, who began to make a connection between chemical contamination and public health in communities along the fencelines of hazardous waste disposal and production sites."

"I was deeply impressed by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It may well be the book by which the human race will stand or fall."

"Forty years ago, Silent Spring delivered a galvanic jolt to public consciousness and, as a result, infused the environmental movement with new substance and meaning...It was Rachel Carson's achievement to synthesize this knowledge into a single image that everyone, scientists and the general public alike, could easily understand...We are still poisoning the air and water and eroding the biosphere, albeit less so than if Rachel Carson had not written. Today we understand better than ever why we must press the effort to save the environment all the way home, true to the mind and spirit of the valiant author of Silent Spring."

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"Facts are more mundane than fantasies, but a better basis for conclusions."

"If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it."

"...new nuclear plants are simply unfinanceable in the private capital market, and the technology will continue to die of an incurable attack of market forces—all the faster in competitive markets. This is true not just in the U.S., where the last order was in 1978 and all orders since 1973 were cancelled, but globally."

"There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That's wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass.... Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months."

"A widely heralded view holds that nuclear power is experiencing a dramatic worldwide revival and vibrant growth, because it’s competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and vital for fuel security and climate protection. That’s all false. In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options."

"Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants' intermittence."

"When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time -- starting now"

"The markets make a good servant but a bad master, and a worse religion"

"Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that make us safe,healthy, and durable. 2006-5-12"

"Once again the hopes of people of two nations are being smashed by weapons in the name of eliminating weapons. Let us abolish weapons of mass destruction at home. Joblessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Hunger is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Poor health care is a weapon of mass destruction. Discrimination is a weapon of mass destruction."

"This is a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party, which in too many cases has become so corporate and identified with corporate interests that you can't tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans."

"The scriptures bid us to send forth our light and our truth and when children carry within their hearts the torch of hope, they learn the darkness yields not only to man-made fire, but to starlight, to the rising sun, and to the light of the soul."

"I am running for President of the United States to enable the goddess of peace to encircle within her reach all the children of this country and all the children of the world."

"America stands strongest in challenging terrorism when we do not give up an inch of our civil liberties."

"You're looking at a guy who believes he can beat a rigged game."

"With the capture of Saddam Hussein the Administration's stated goal of removing him from power has been accomplished. Now the focus must be on ending the occupation. International law must be followed and Saddam Hussein must be held accountable for his actions.The United States must seize this moment and end the occupation of Iraq. The United States must reach out to the world community with a new plan to stabilize Iraq, bring UN peacekeepers in, and bring US troops home."

"He (George W. Bush) is going in the wrong way. And I dare say, that is what the strategy of his administration is, is just to wipe out government's purpose for any social and economic justice at all."

"I believe sincerely that we should bring in U.N. peacekeepers and bring our troops home."

"I took the position of organizing 126 Democrats who voted against the Iraq war resolution. And I happen to think it was the right position.Today we're faced with over 500 casualties, a cost of over $200 billion, and it could rise — the casualties could go into the thousands and the costs could go over a half trillion if we stay there for years, as a number of people on this stage intend to see happen."

"I hold in my heart that rebellious spirit of youth that demands change."

"Almost half of the bankruptcies in the United States are connected to an illness in the family, whether people had health insurance or not. Middle-class Americans, who had the misfortune of either experiencing a medical emergency themselves or watching a family member suffer, were then forced to face the daunting task of pulling themselves out of debt. Bankruptcy law has allowed them to start over. It has given hope. Now this new law will put people on their own. Illness or emergency creates medical bills. We are telling the people that they themselves are to blame. At the same time, we are removing protections that would stay an eviction, that would keep a roof over the head of a working family. We allow the credit industry to trick consumers into using subprime cards, with exorbitant interest rate hikes and fees. Then we hand those same consumers over to an unforgiving prison of debt, to be put on a rack of insolvency and squeezed dry by the credit card industry. We are protecting the profits of the credit card industry instead of protecting the economic future of the American people. Americans are left on their own. That's what this Administration's "Ownership Society" is all about — you're on your own — and your ship is sinking."

"The administration, through senior Air Force officials, wants the U.S. to achieve military supremacy in outer space. Dominating all earth from outer space will have an out-of-world price tag, perhaps more than $1 trillion.A question: Why reach for the stars with guns in our hands? Are there weapons of mass destruction on Mars?Yesterday 28 Members of Congress signed on to H.R. 2420, a bill to stop the weaponization of space, urging the President to sign an international treaty to ban such weapons. If we work together towards creating peace on earth, we would not bring war to the high heavens.While some fantasize about being "masters of the universe," there are 45 million Americans without health insurance. Corporations are reneging on pension obligations. Social Security is under attack. We are headed towards a $400 billion annual budget deficit, a $600 billion trade deficit, an $8 trillion national debt. The cost of the war in Iraq is over $200 billion. While we build new bases in Iraq, we close them in the United States.Earth to Washington, D.C. Earth to Washington, D.C. D.C., call home."

"The PATRIOT Act allows Federal agents to look at public and university library patron circulation records, books checked out, magazines consulted, all subject to government scrutiny.There used to be a time in this country when we were worried whether our young people knew how to read. Now some in our government are more worried that government agents be able to find out what people are reading."

"Our amendment earmarks $10 million out of the account called Army Research, Development, Test and Evaluation. The money would go to a research program administered by the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in the DoD, for identifying the biological mechanisms behind the illnesses — particularly the neurological and immunological ones; the chronic disease effects; better diagnostic criteria for the illnesses; and identification of treatments. The MRMC will design a research plan for that purpose, relying heavily on the expertise outside DoD and the VA. It will be subject to peer review by experts, a significant number of which will be independent of DoD.$10 million will have a large impact on veterans who rely on the government to take care of them after they have taken care of us.I urge my colleagues to support the Kucinich-Shays-Sanders amendment. Vote 'yes' to restore research funding for Gulf War Illnesses."

"The center has shifted in our politics. I'm really at the center. And all the other candidates are to the right of me."

"I think we have to get rid of nuclear weapons. The idea that somehow by having nuclear weapons you make the world a safer place is essentially insane."

"I’ve been a vegan now since 1995, that would be more than 14 years, and as a result I’ve had tremendous health… great energy, clarity — I’ve had the ability to connect my dietary choices with my health. I had Crohn’s growing up and I had a pretty serious bout with it throughout my thirties and forties. When I changed my diet, the symptoms began to disappear. And I started to understand also how the choice of diet affects the environment, resources, energy — it’s a spiritual choice, as well. And so if I had one day to make an imprint on the nation, I’d look at the choices that we make as respect to food. Also, the matters of compassion towards living creatures who become food. We need to be more thoughtful as a nation about the choices that we make and the food that we consume."

"Now, 42 years after the end of his first term as mayor, Dennis Kucinich is ready for his second.... While the Kucinich for Mayor campaign revs up, his new book—titled "The Division of Light and Power"—is drawing a lot of praise. It's a stunning page-turner and barnburner that combines the genres of political memoir and real-life narrative thriller — a luminous book that goes to shadowy places with the resolve of Diogenes holding a lantern high. While offering the inside story of historic events, the book also implicitly takes us to the real time of the present... The achievements of the book mirror its subject and its author — truth-telling and courage despite political taboos and illegitimate power — showing how people from many walks of life can work together to overcome the forces of petty opportunism and corporate greed... You can bet that the Kucinich for Mayor campaign has already set off alarm bells among economic elites in Cleveland and far beyond. Mayor Kucinich could set an example for what a city government can do to serve everyone instead of just the interests of the wealthy."

"We tend to think of America's days of frontier exploration as being behind us, but that's because we tend not to think of the other 71% of our blue planet."

"Remember that sign they hung up in an EPA office during the Reagan administration, "No good deed goes unpunished"? Under George Bush, no good science goes unpunished."

"Actually, any time I get to blow bubbles pretty much lights me up."

"The terminally cute sea otter is a marine weasel into rough sex. The male otter's arms (legs, whatever) are effective for grooming their fine pelts or cracking shells on the rocks they place on their bellies, but they are too short for getting a good grip on a mate. So the male gets firm purchase by biting down on the female's nose before going for a little splendor in the kelp. Afterward you can often spot the females hauled up on rocks along the shore, their fur matted and their noses bloody. It's not hard to imagine that a female with a heavily scarred nose might get a reputation as an easy otter."

"My motive for what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.… I certainly don't claim to be an altruist or acting for the "good" (whatever that is) of the human race. I act merely from a desire for revenge. Of course, I would like to get revenge on the whole scientific and bureaucratic establishment, not to mention the communists and others who threaten freedom, but that being impossible, I have to content myself with just a little revenge."

"After I had skipped 6th grade and begun feeling a great deal of hostility toward many of my schoolmates, I developed a habit of trying to find ways of justifying my hatred in terms of my moral system. By and by I got bored with this game. One day when I was 13 years old, I was walking down the street and saw a girl. Something about her appearance antagonized me and, from habit, I began looking for a way to justify hating her, within my logical system. But then I stopped and said to myself, "This is getting ridiculous. I'll just chuck all this silly morality business and hate anybody I please." Since then I have never had any interest in or respect for morality, ethics, or anything of the sort."

"Just then came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn't care if I died. And so I said to myself why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.… I will kill, but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection so that I can kill again."

"This guy is clearly typical member of the technician class. Might even be one of the guys that has flown those fucking jets over my home. This gives great relief to my choking, frustrated anger and sense of impotence against the system. At the same time, must admit I feel badly about having crippled this man’s arm. It has been bothering me a good deal. This is embarrassing because while my feelings are partly from pity, I am sure they come largely from the training, propaganda, brainwashing we all get, conditioning us to be scared by the idea of doing certain things. It is shameful to be under the sway of this brainwashing. But do not get the idea that I regret what I did. Relief of frustrated anger outweighs uncomfortable conscience."

"Recently I camped in a paradise like glacial cirque. At evening, beautiful singing of birds was ruined by the obscene roar of jet planes. Then I laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling an airplane pilot."

"But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods."

"The big problem is that people don't believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible."

"Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton's Lives of Game Animals to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience."

"No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that's what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit."

"Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost."

"I must tell you that mathematicians are not scientists, they are artists. ... Apart from the most elementary mathematics, like arithmetic or high school algebra, the symbols, formulas and words of mathematics have no meaning at all. The entire structure of pure mathematics is a monstrous swindle, simply a game, a reckless prank. You may well ask: "Are there no renegades to reveal the truth?" Yes, of course. But the facts are so incredible that no one takes them seriously. So the secret is in no danger."

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

"The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine."

"If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later."

"The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential"

"Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society."

"We are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not."

"Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression."

"In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs."

"And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors)."

"Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems. But we do not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today."

"A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society."

"Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. These are the people who aren't interested in money. Material acquisition does not serve their need for the power process."

"In any case it is not normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put into their work."

"Also, science and technology constitute a power mass movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass movement. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."

"One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness."

"In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people."

"A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do."

"People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control."

"The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior."

"The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system."

"The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress."

"A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and retain only the "good" parts."

"It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises."

"Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology?"

"We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society."

"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. (Yes, we know that depression is often of purely genetic origin. We are referring here to those cases in which environment plays the predominant role.)"

"To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been."

"The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) don't think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped, and we will give here some indications of how to go about stopping it."

"Smashing up McDonald's or Starbuck's is pointless. Not that I give a damn about McDonald's or Starbuck's. I don't care whether anyone smashes them up or not. But that is not a revolutionary activity. Even if every fast-food chain in the world were wiped out the techno-industrial system would suffer only minimal harm as a result, since it could easily survive without fast-food chains. When you attack McDonald's or Starbuck's, you are not hitting where it hurts."

"The techno-industrial system is exceptionally tough due to its so-called "democratic" structure and its resulting flexibility. Because dictatorial systems tend to be rigid, social tensions and resistance can be built up in them to the point where they damage and weaken the system and may lead to revolution. But in a "democratic" system, when social tension and resistance build up dangerously the system backs off enough, it compromises enough, to bring the tensions down to a safe level."

"There are two kinds of morality—the kind of morality that one imposes on oneself and the kind of morality that one imposes on others. For the first kind of morality, that is, for self-restraint, I have the greatest respect. The second kind of morality I do not respect except when it constitutes self-defense. (For example, when women say that rape and wife-beating are immoral, that is self-defense.) I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others (not in self-defense) are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves."

"To judge from the Internet postings that people have sent me, probably most of what you learned [about me] was nonsense."

"A mistake that most people make is to assume that the more followers you can recruit, the better. That's true if you are trying to win an election. A vote is a vote regardless of whether the voter is deeply committed or just barely interested enough to get to the polls. But when you're building a revolutionary movement, the number of people you have is far less important than the quality of your people and the depth of their commitment. Too many lukewarm or otherwise unsuitable people will ruin the movement."

"Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values."

"Its is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call "freedom". In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he's unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous."

"There are many people today who see that modern society is heading toward disaster in one form or another, and who moreover recognize technology as the common thread linking the principal dangers that hang over us."

"People ... can think of nothing better to do than to continue attacking particular evils while vaguely hoping that their work will somehow help to solve the overall problem of technology. In reality their work is counterproductive, because it distracts attention from the technological system itself as the underlying source of the evils and leads people to focus instead on problems of limited significance that moreover cannot be permanently solved while the technological system continues to exist."

"The development of a society can never be subject to rational human control."

"In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences."

"Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems."

"As technology progresses and globalization grows more pervasive, the world-system becomes ever more complex and more tightly coupled, so that a catastrophic breakdown has to be expected sooner or later."

"Meanwhile, fierce competition among global self-prop systems will have led to such drastic and rapid alterations in the Earth's climate, the composition of its atmosphere, the chemistry of its oceans, and so forth, that the effect on the biosphere will be devastating. ... We will argue that if the development of the technological world-system is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, then in all probability the Earth will be left a dead planet-a planet on which nothing will remain alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms-certain bacteria, algae, etc.-that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions."

"It seems amazing that those who advocate energy conservation haven't noticed what happens: As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more."

"The ultimate goal of a revolutionary movement today must be the total collapse of the worldwide technological system."

"An antitechnological movement that focused on the elimination of capitalism would gain little in return for an enormous expenditure of energy. What is worse, by focusing on capitalism the movement would distract its own and other people's attention from the far more important objective of bringing down the technological system itself."

"Once a man is a murderer, I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know about him is that he's a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering, and his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being."

"It was a feeling of being trapped – trapped in this brother relationship, trapped in this dilemma in which people's lives were at stake either way. One way, if we did nothing, another bomb might go off and more people might die. The other way, I turned Ted in and he would be executed."

"[The first time Kaczynski's sister-in-law thought he might be the unabomber] I'd thought about the families that were bombed. There was one in which the package arrived to the man's home and his little 2-year-old daughter was there. She was almost in the room when he opened the package. Luckily she left, and his wife left. [...] And then he died. And there were others. And so I spent those days thinking about those people."

"In the 1960s there was a young man who had just graduated from the University of Michigan who was doing brilliant work in mathematics, specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went to Berkeley, where he was an assistant professor and showed amazing potential. Then he moved to Montana and blew the competition away."

"People have been willing to accept that the government is lying to us, but [are now also] more willing to accept the concept of aliens and other life forms. There's just a slew of stuff out there right now. It's been people's closet belief system, and now it's coming out of the closet."

"There are huge differences in the way male and female actors are perceived. Women have to be a certain size, in order to get good roles. The only successful, larger-than-average female actor I can think of is Kathy Bates. And once women reach a certain age, they can only expect one or two good roles per year, whereas male actors can continue working regularly well into their forties. Then there are the types of roles available to women. We're constantly depicted as sidekicks, ingenues, and hangers-on, rarely as independent and capable individuals. And the enormous, huge discrepancies in pay....the amounts that some male actors make are astronomically obscene. Women in Hollywood are constantly shown that there's a difference between them and men, and that that's okay. But it's not okay."

"Something happened when I got pregnant, and I'm not able to listen to that kind of music as much. I feel like I'm going nuts when I listen to it. I used to listen to Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, PiL, Butthole Surfers. But today, I can't. I love Alanis Morissette, Emmylou Harris' latest album, and all sorts of jazz and blues. If I want to hear something heavy duty, I'll put on the Foo Fighters or a good rocking Rolling Stones song. But that's as intense as I've got."

"I wouldn't say I'm normal, but I'm relatively stable. When I think of normalcy I think of mediocrity and mediocrity scares the fuck out of me."

"I didn't really think too much about the fact that it was about aliens. I was intrigued by that aspect of it, but I was more intrigued by the relationship between Mulder and Scully, and how intelligent this woman was, and that she would stand up in the face of his intelligence and feel comfortable with him."

"I will not tolerate not being heard as a result of excess testosterone."

"Just remember, you can do anything you set your mind to, but it takes action, perseverance, and facing your fears."

"Another miraculous result of playing Scully has been all the incredible young women I have been blessed to meet along the way--women who have shared that they have received strength from Scully, that because of Scully's strength they have been afraid but done it anyway. These have been women from all walks of life: women from low-income neighborhoods who have persevered despite all odds to study hard and pursue their dreams, enabling them to enter into better schools and work environments; women who have illness and physical challenges who have gotten better and stronger because they believe they can. I truly believe that we can overcome any hurdle that lies before us and create the life we want to live. I have seen it happen time and time again."

"My whole belief system is that our paths are drawn for us. I believe in reincarnation. I believe we're here to learn and grow. We choose how we come into this life based on what it is we have to learn. Some people have harder lessons than others."

"Sometimes, I genuinely enjoy having conversations with journalists; enjoying the few moments of intimacy with a stranger is fascinating to me. But once in a while that backfires and you're suddenly reading something that has a bent on it that you didn't feel was in the least bit a part of the conversation that you thought you were having. Then you get overly protective and say very little and then you come out of the hole again."

"When I was younger I think I showed off and I fed off the attention. And to a certain degree that has been satiated in this job, just in doing what I do. I think it's enough that I don't need to then push it."

"There is this view that if you are not tormented you cannot be vital and creative. I would like to think that is not true."

"Having been Scully for such a long time, I have to prove myself in other roles."

"Directing was a transformative experience for me, one that I really enjoyed."

"You know, the last time I was on [the show], we were talking about colonics and this is a little step up."

"If I chose to have a nanny, I'd be able to pay to have a nanny - a lot of women don't have that opportunity. I don't feel like I'm a working single mom, because I have that option that a lot of people don't have."

"I always felt I wasn't completely American and I wasn't completely British: there was a feeling of having my feet in both places."

"I also respond very strongly to characters I have not done before... something I can really sink my teeth into, and what's scary, and what terrifies me, because that's where I need to go."

"In England, I get offered films. I don't get offers in America. People don't know what to do with me in America. And I've disappeared."

"I try, in my life, to follow my heart. I know what it feels like to do things that are soul-decaying. A large aspect of life in Hollywood, in a stereotypic way, I find unbelievably soul-decaying. And I choose, albeit frustratingly to other people in my life, not to expose myself too much to too much of that."

"When I finished the series, I wasn't going to do television again. I never wanted to do television to begin with, and I was so exhausted by the process that I was wary of being in front of the camera again."

"I became an actor because it was the only thing I could do. I didn't have any friends, I didn't fit in. But when I started acting everything in my life shifted and I felt happy."

"I would never point a finger at anyone and say, 'They lived their life badly.' I take it as it comes and deal with each situation as it arrives."

"By moving to London I removed myself from the madness of the entertainment industry. I love the city and the culture, and it was an opportunity to bring my children up in a more sane environment."

"Dear Gillian, You are completely and utterly self obsessed. If you spent a quarter of your time thinking about others instead of how much you hate your thighs, your level of contentment and self worth would expand exponentially. One thing I learned way too late in the game for my own good was that you can effectively increase your self esteem by doing estimable things. Therefore I have signed you up to build homes for the homeless during your entire summer vacation. Your Christmas will be spent serving food at a battered women’s shelter and Easter is designated to reading stories to children in the pediatric cancer ward. Four months out of 16years dedicated to human beings other than yourself, you have gotten off easy. Oh and honey expand your horizons; your world is a bigger oyster than your low self-esteem wants you to believe. Love yourself; think of others and be grateful. I love you, I believe in you, and I look forward to respecting you. Me. You. Us P.S. Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends."

"London is my favourite city in the world. Flying in last night, I felt I was really coming home, and that's unique. It's the only place I actually miss when I'm not here. London appeals to many aspects of me - it just feels like where I belong."

"I've been asked whether I feel more like a Brit than an American and I don't know what the answer to that question is. I know that I feel that London is home and I'm very happy with that as my home. I love London as a city and I feel very comfortable there. In terms of identity, I'm still a bit baffled."

"If was a refugee forced to flee my home the most important thing I would take with me would be my brother's Buddhist prayer beads. He passed away a year and a half ago aged 30. Even in the darkest days before he died he never once complained. His faith and practice kept him in a state of grace until the end. May I never complain."

"You look just like that Mulder on X Factor."

"I would masturbate in a red speedo."

"We got a lot of letters all the time, and I was told quite frequently by girls who were going into the medical world or the science world or the FBI world or other worlds that I reigned, that they were pursuing those pursuits because of the character of Scully. And I said, 'Yay!'"

"I had started to become interested in the punk scene and started to dress differently than a lot of the kids in Grand Rapids, Michigan were dressing. And I got my nose pierced and I started to shave my head and dye my hair and wear a lot of black. And so I looked like somebody that might be arrested... I was a bit of a class clown, usually the one that people would get to do the things that they were afraid to get in trouble for... On graduation night, I was arrested... I had a boyfriend at the time who was a couple centuries older than I was and I'd convinced him that we should go and glue the locks of the school so that people couldn't get in the morning. And lo and behold, they had a security guard because it was graduation night and they were concerned that idiots like me might try and do something like that."

"Get out of the house. Find other human beings to communicate with. Read a book. Do yoga. Meditate. Be of service. That is one of the biggest single most things to get one out of oneself, is being of service to people who are less fortunate than ourselves."

"I have feminist bones and when I hear things or see people react to women in certain ways I have very little tolerance."

"Above anything else, stay true to yourself. Whether that means for you that you like to have blue hair, or you don't like to drink, or you are attracted to the same sex, or you want to remove yourself from Facebook, or you've got 3 different kids from 3 different dads but you know you're a really good mom, or you cry for a week because your turtle died. Whatever your truth is, stay true to yourself. But be a good person while you're at it."

"We shot the first five seasons up in Vancouver, so we were protected from the public mania, and the industry mania, for the most part. I was first exposed to it when I became pregnant in the first season, and I quickly learned the power of the machine; then again when I was trying to negotiate my salary to be closer to equal to what David [Duchovny] was making, rather than a quarter. Yes, it's been an ongoing education, but it continues to astound me."

"At the beginning [of The X-Files] the pay disparity was massive. But that happens all the time in Hollywood. It's, 'Do this for me, I'll get you a job.' All the stuff in the papers today about people in entertainment who have abused their position... it's built into our society. It's easy to miss and it's easy to get used to it. There are things that are intolerable in today's world, in terms of the perception of women. Whether they're vamps or vixens, the expectation that, if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she's 'asking for it.'"

"I am an actively heterosexual woman who celebrates however people want to express their sexuality."

"I don't think I'd be very good at what you'd call an ordinary job. I think I might be an artist, mixed media. And that is still something I'm interested in pursuing at some point, but I have this fear of taking my eye off the ball, and get distracted from that acting thing."

"We were in a small Republican town. There were only six punks there. We were weird. It's not like London."

"I was a confident fuck-up. I did drugs, and I went to concerts, and I snuck out of the house and I did all that stuff that rebellious teenagers do."

"To me a relationship is about loving another human being; their gender is irrelevant."

"Peace of mind, right mind, right action."

"I don't necessarily consider myself to be an icon, but I do consider myself to be a feminist."

"I've always been a believer. I've been a believer in many different realms of alternate reality, the human capacity to move out of different planes of reality. It's something that has been with me since I was a child."

"I like women a lot and I champion them. I tell people when they are beautiful, I tell other actresses when I think their work is amazing... So I think women feel relatively comfortable in my presence. Also, because I'm not perfect, you know? I've got flabby thighs, I'm aging and I'm 5ft 3in. I talk about my failing in contemporary society in terms of gyms or food or whatever. I think there's a polite appreciation that I'm honest."

"I sometimes don't enjoy it at all, and sometimes it feels like... breath."

"Young women have more choices to make today about what to be. One of those choices is activist."

"I'm damaged in many ways. And yet a lot of what my fight is about is pushing through that to live a meaningful, sane existence and make a difference and play to my strengths."

"I cannot abide red tape. It never strangles bad ideas, only good ones."

"“How do you have a child without being terrified all the time?” “Well, that’s the big secret to parenting, Ben,” Caitlin whispered. “You are terrified all the time. You get used to it. It becomes part of the background. Except for the times when it stabs you through the heart.” He gazed at her a moment, then looked down at his menu. “That was probably the worst sales pitch ever for having kids,” he said."

"The United States ambassador’s proposal for a demilitarized zone between the nations had been met with derision in India, whose pundits pointed out that Pakistan could not even establish a de-terrorized zone within it own borders."

"If irony were clean water, this would be a paradise."

"“Do you think I am ill? Mentally?” “Not at all. I believe you had a reaction to something—” “Like an allergy? Peanuts? We don’t have food allergies in Haiti,” she said with disgust. “We cannot afford to.”"

"Is that the ultimate paradox of life, she wondered, that the universe should become less clear with age?"

"Every fictional character is based on someone. My English teacher told us that."

"But “everyone knew” were words of death in scientific research."

"Predawn has always been undervalued as a witching hour, she thought. Midnight, in prose and poem, had gotten all the glory. At this hour, though, people had to gather their lonely, enervated willpower and make the first choices of the day. For that you needed raw courage."

"The universe doesn’t editorialize."

"Familiarity helped to construct subterfuge."

"“So,” Adrienne said. “You’re one of those.” “One of what?” Flora said, not turning her head. “One of those people who has a single success and takes that as a mandate to do anything you want.”"

"“I thought we had the conversation about my being uninterested in your opinions,” Flora said."

"Flora chose that moment to selectively not hear."

"“Dr. Davies, why are you obsessed with these?” “A scholar’s interest in the inexplicable.” “No,” Adrienne said. “A scholar would be publishing articles about these in journals, and asking every scientist and researcher she could contact for help with studying them.” Flora ignored her. “You’re keeping secrets,” Adrienne said. Again, she made no reply."

"An archaeology group that hadn’t publicized one of the greatest finds in the history of the field was probably not to be trusted."

"It’s a fair bargain. Some trust, some distrust, in the end win win."

"Mikel knew better than to question her. Not because she was always right, but because there was no changing her mind once it was set."

"Hot water is good for bathing, bad for fish."

"“The intrigue is not even what makes this work intriguing,” he quipped."

"“That is irreligious.” “As your comment is ill-informed,” Caitlin replied."

"The geology, the cosmos, they waken something. Even in scientists."

"“Divination has always embraced strange, ultimately disproved customs,” she said."

"He had looked at Qala then and said, “And I hope we never find out. That would make someone right and someone wrong.” “Isn’t knowledge worth that?” Qala had asked. “Questions are always more valuable than answers,” Nimma had replied. “I suppose if answers encourage new questions, they are valid. But this one? I do not think any of the major participants would receive the truth kindly, or willingly.”"

"Either everything matters or nothing does."

"She's a beautiful actress and a beautiful person. We bonded in the abandoned mental institution we were filming in together."

"I ADORE Gillian. She's smart and strong and fascinating. What a talent."

"Gillian Anderson is greatest actress of her generation."

"Every time Gillian Anderson appears on the television, my wife looks at me like I'm mentally cheating on her."

"She arrived as a surprise guest, and was charming and funny and utterly wonderful. On seeing her, I was as cool as you might expect, if by being cool means standing at the sides of the stage, unable to move my limbs in her direction. The many nights I'd spent with Agent Scully in my 20s, imaging our imaginary life together, left me flushed and embarrassment."

"She has become like a proper feminist icon. There are so many straight women having girl crushes. You're turning Britain lezzy!"

"I had to fight for Gillian. Not because of her youth or relative inexperience, but because she didn't fit the network's or the studio's idea of the prime-time tootsie. She didn't have the usual assets they thought of in a TV man-woman relationship."

"Gillian Anderson is one of a kind. She's lovely. She's a fantastic mother. A steadfast friend. More beautiful today than she's ever been. And a natural actor who was born to her art."

"I gaze at her perfect skin, unable to suspend my disbelief. One of the more unnerving things about Anderson is that no photographer has ever done her justice; in the flesh, she is 10 times more exquisite than on the page – today, as I now point out, being no exception."

"One of the reasons why I thought she is the best actress of her generation is because she is incredibly focused, understated, truthful, detailed, intelligent, with an underpinning of emotion that she chooses, for the most part, to keep in check."

"I didn't want her to look kind of perfect, but one of the things about Gillian is that she always kind of looks stunning, just because she's got such an interesting face. There's such an intelligence going on in her acting, I think, your eye is drawn to her."

"My secret crush of a famous person that people will actually have heard of? I'm quite conventional. I really love Gillian Anderson. Like, ever since she was Scully and I wasn't even out then. It always surprised me but now I know. I love Gillian Anderson. I like red heads so I quite like Susan Sarandon and Helen Mirren. But Gillian Anderson -- totally, totally love that."

"I think she's got a wonderful stillness in her performances, so that she never seems to be acting particularly. She just brought a terrific sense of tragedy to this part, a woman who has spent her life being so contained, with almost no ability to express herself."

"She's so remarkable. She's not one of those actors who just does her usual thing every time. She's completely different in everything she does – she even has a different voice in every role."

"I was looking for someone who had that kind of period look; I wanted the film to look like Singer Sargent portraits and I saw her extraordinary face and that kind of luminosity that one associated with Greer Garson in the late 40s. I just thought... she'll never meet me; she'll never say yes."

"She's a fantastic amazing actress. That’s so evident in her work; in everything she has done – I think especially in The Fall, but she's so fun as well... For my money, she's really sweet and funny and easy and has really giggly childish side to her that comes out often on set. She's great and I can't say enough of good things about her. She's brilliant."

"I think she gets better and better and she's more and more beautiful every year. And she's just... she's a dream."

"...Gillian Anderson, the best co-star anybody could have."

"Gillian has beautiful eyes. Her eyes anchor me to the scene. They're big and they're blue and they're wet."

"Gillian's a really hard working actress. I can tell you that much. A lot of times when I give up on a scene, she stays in there. She never doesn't try to do it as well as she can. That can be pretty inspiring. And infuriating."

"Gillian is every bit as hot, and hotter. It's somewhat shocking."

"There's a recognition, an animal recognition, of meeting your match. Stanley is not going to give up and neither is Blanche. That’s what’s exciting about what Gillian has done is empower Blanche. Her performance is very strong – she's a warrior – a glamorous warrior."

"[She's] one the of the most elegant and savage performers I've worked with. We're boxing each other off the stage every night, with love."

"There is such a clever quality to Gillian's performance where she's balancing so much in terms of tone that she goes from these very serious pontificating scenes about the nature of what they’re doing to virtually a broader comedy of sorts."

"What self-respecting gay man doesn't want to be Gillian Anderson?"

"I think that’s the fun of playing with such an iconic actress like Gillian Anderson who really expands to fill the vessel of whatever role she’s inhabiting. Working with her has been such a joy: A, I love her as a human being and find her to be such a bright spark of light, and B, it’s a ball to throw some absolutely ridiculous dialogue her way and see how it spins off the edge of her bat. If you are watching the show and you see a particularly bloated piece of dialogue, chances are it’s a direct quote from one of the Thomas Harris books that I’ve fetishized over in the process of making the show, and there are some doozies where I'm like, 'this is such a great line — I want to make it dialogue but it’s so over the top... I’ll give it to Gillian!' So that’s a joy."

"Just saw Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Named Desire at St Ann's warehouse. She was remarkable, powerful, funny, tragic."

"I mean I was OBSESSED with The X-Files and I wanted to marry... She was the one person who I was like, 'We're gonna get married. One of these days, she and I will finally meet and this will finally happen.' So last night I was just sitting next to her like, [whispers] 'It's Gillian Anderson, oh my God.' I don't even know what I said or how I answered the questions; I was just looking at her like, 'She's so beautiful.'"

"Just finished watching the utterly compelling series The Fall on Netflix. What an amazing and beautiful actress. That's Gillian Anderson of course. I knew she was amazing when she was in Bleak House, but she gets better and better."

"G-Money, as I call her."

"... Gillian Anderson. One of the nastiest actors I have run into in all these years in the business. David was just the sweetest, and kept me from walking off the job."

"Who wouldn't be infatuated by Gillian Anderson?! Gillian Anderson could play a rabbit and I would be totally be infatuated by her."

"You are our most censored guest ever... But it was my fault; I asked you what was your favorite curse word and you continued to use it like 48 times."

"I thought Gillian Anderson was amazing in The House of Mirth, also adapted from a Wharton novel. She should certainly have been nominated for an Oscar. Will you put that in, please? Every now and then I think there is huge injustice in our business."

"I'm in awe of Gillian's work of late, all of the stuff that she’s done. Oh my god, The Fall, she’s amazing in that! It's just always great to see a great actor, so that's exciting right there. And Duchovny is everybody’s favorite puppy dog."

"I knew I was gay when I would stay up and watch Saturday Night Live, put on a wifebeater and lift weights. Also, I'd masturbate to Gillian Anderson in The X-Files... That's when my mom found out."

"Outstanding. Fantastic. She's a stunning living legend."

"She's a fantastic wonderful actress and she's an extremely funny person as well. So we had some good fun quality time together."

"I have to say something about Gillian Anderson before we go on. Have you seen her in The Fall? This is just an amazing actress, just an amazing actress. I just have to throw that in there. So she's had to sort of transcend Scully, I think, and she has."

"Being with Gillian was like going to a surprise party. Gillian had an eight-line part in a French farce but turned it into a star role just by the attitude she brought to it. She has an incandescence."

"Honestly, Gillian Anderson as the next James Bond would be the greatest thing of all time."

"You've got to go for it, and once she had her confidence, it was as though there was nothing she could not do. To this day, she is one of the most remarkable performers I have had the privilege of working with, and I would work with her again in a second."

"Gillian's a lot of fun, very intelligent, has great ideas and creates a lovely atmosphere on set."

"Just like Mitch Pileggi, I too had a crush on you."

"Skinner had a huge, huge, huge crush on Scully and that's why he was so pissed off at Mulder all the time, because he knew he didn’t have a chance and it was always there. And it was so easy; just looking at you. Because I had a crush on you! I ended up marrying her photo-double, so here you go. That's all I'm going to say about that."

"When I did The X-Files I didn't have a lot to do with her, except when I was lying there dead. But she was so sweet; she welcomed me to the set, she thanked me for being a part of the show. An Amazing woman. I think she also broke boundaries, because on television she wasn’t this tall statuesque blonde that you would expected that the network would cast. They cast this really interesting, beautiful, nonetheless but interesting, intelligent woman. And I think she changed the way people perceived women on television, because she broke the mold. She wasn't what you expected and she ended being probably one of the most beautiful. So I have huge admiration for her."

"I was very lucky to see the brilliant Gillian Anderson as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic in London the other night. She is just exceptional... what a power house."

"My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory."

"At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone."

"Every part of all this soil is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hollowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust you now stand on responds more willingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch."

"Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only change of worlds."

"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy - and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his fathers' graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten."

"Tribe follows tribe, nations follow nations like the tides of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless."

"Today is fair. Tomorrow may be overcast with clouds. My words are like the stars that never change."

"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?"

"Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people."

"The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory of the red man."

"The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors."

"If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother."

"You must teach the children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves."

"Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect."

"The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."

"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man."

"In this moment of spiritual triumph we can see why the film (Follow Me Home) begins with a quotation of words by Chief Seattle, when he said that after the last red man was gone the land would still be filled with their spirits: "The white man will never be alone." Is this a promise (as heard by some people of color) or a threat (as heard by some whites) or simply a truth that we should all heed?"

"Just like Chief Seattle talked about being in the web of life, in India we talk about vasudhaiva kutumbkam, which means the earth family. Indian cosmology has never separated the human from the non-human—we are a continuum."

"Even from the beginning, when I was doing junk television, I still had this focus. I knew I wasn't going to be doing that forever, that I wasn't going to be like that..."

"I act for free, but I demand a huge salary as compensation for all the annoyance of being a public personality. In that sense, I earn every dime I make."

"You know, I look like a duck. I just do. And I'm not the only person who thinks that. It's the way my mouth sort of curls up or my nose tilts up. I should have played Howard the Duck."

"I don't like talking about the characters I do in film, ever. There's no deep, dark meaning. It's just an idea. It's just an idea."

"I had a big mouth, and I used to mouth off to my mother all the time. But I'd make sure my father wasn't in earshot, because he'd let me have it. I was very strong-willed, very stubborn, and fairly dramatic, I guess. I remember my mother calling me a drama queen when I would be carrying on: 'Here's my little actress.' And I was a real tomboy. I wasn't a terribly feminine little girl. I never thought I was attractive to boys; I remember when the first boy liked me, I couldn't believe it. All the little girls with ringlets and crinoline dresses were the ones the boys liked. I was always beating them up — why should they like me? I was always the biggest girl in the class, and if somebody wanted someone beaten up, they'd come and get me. I was the school bully. No wonder I played Catwoman. It all comes full circle."

"The description of the character is that Frankie is an attractive woman if she'd just put a little effort into how she looks. So that's basically the way I played her. I consider myself an attractive woman, and I can be not-so-great-looking if I don't put effort into how I look. But more importantly, the core of the character was someone who had given up on love, and that could be any age, any size, any form of beauty. That could be anybody."

"I used to stay up very late at night, much later than I probably should have for such a youngster, and I used to watch very old black-and-white movies with, you know, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but I remember watching them thinking 'I could do that'... Even though I wasn't inclined at all to actually become an actress. I mean, that wasn't something that was... in the stars for me, no pun intended."

"So I do the test, and we do this scene, and it's the scene at the end where I throw dishes, and so I threw some dishes... and 'Cut!'... And I look around, and there's blood everywhere, because I broke a plate or something, and they're all checking me — 'Oh my God, she cut herself' — and couldn't find any cut, and then I look, and I realise. I see Al's hand is bleeding. And I cut Al Pacino, in my screen test. I think then he liked me. I think that was actually the turning point."

"I don't like improvisation. I really don't. I'm the only one that will admit it. Because I think people think you're not a real actor if you don't like to improv. I don't like it."

"It's usually just awkward. It's not terribly romantic or steamy. Sometimes people's wives show up — "Hey, how you doing?"… I had a wedding scene with someone once, and the girlfriend showed up in a white dress..."

"That would have to be the F-word. Do you want me to say it? It's so descriptive, it can be used in so many ways — it can be used lovingly, it can be used in the most hateful — it's just very versatile... and you know, it's just, sometimes no other word will do."

"I always look at it as — it's like a treasure map, and each little detail in it, you sort of look at it for information and it points you in the right direction, to tell you where you need to go. You start out with a few choices, obviously — I need to learn the clarinet or I need to learn the cello, or I need to learn how to stay underwater without panicking — but it is like painting in a way, that at a certain point, the painting begins to tell you what to do. And with acting, it's the same — with acting in film, anyway — at a certain point then, what you've already put on screen begins to dictate to you where you need to go, and then it just starts to create itself in a way. And what I try to do is find a strand of myself, as different as I might feel the character is from me, and as removed as it is, I always try to find that one part of me. And then you kind of build on to that, because it's a way to keep you connected. And you never want to lose that connection. There's always some sort of parallel that's going on in my own life, and so you can use it to, you know, bring closure, perhaps, to certain things that you haven't. A healing, a reconnection. And I believe in that. I believe in that."

"Eating a vegan diet — it’s just so much healthier — and you avoid a lot of toxins that could age your skin and your body. I really noticed a difference in my skin not too long after switching to fully vegan. … The older I’ve gotten, the more it’s occurred to me that I’m doing it in order to live longer, though the vanity component will always be there. … I just told myself one day that I’m going to do it and I’m going to give myself eight weeks. And that I’m not going to commit on this for a lifetime because it’s psychologically huge for people to wrap their minds around it. And I’m just going to see how I feel, I’m going to test my blood again and see if there’s anything. Giving it that long you sort of get over the fact of feeling how big and difficult it is at the beginning. And if you really give yourself long enough to start feeling differently and sort of see the benefits then it will be great."

"'She's the blonde in Scarface,' they say to me about Michelle Pfeiffer. Now her I know. She made this year's great movie entrance, descending, back to camera, in the glass elevator of a drug czar's Florida mansion, wearing a green satin evening dress that seemed about to fall off her. Rarely in a movie have I seen an actress so perfectly groomed, so coolly elegant. There hasn't been a platinum-blonde star for a long time, and I waited, fascinated, to meet her. She is on the verge of stardom. In the parlance of the industry, she is hot. She is appearing in one hot movie, has another coming out, and others await only her availability to begin shooting. 'Hello,' she said, when she arrived. 'Hello,' I replied, trying to zero in on the unfamiliar face... and then it registered: Michelle Pfeiffer is, alas, no longer blonde. She became blonde for the role. Nor is she a fashion plate. In fact, she has absolutely no interest in fashion or chic. Like Garbo, who cared nothing for such trappings either, she took on the accoutrements that went along with the part, so convincingly that I had assumed the end product was the starting point — the reason she had been cast in the first place."

"Michelle represents the best of both worlds. She's very feminine, understated and sophisticated, yet also mysterious, confident and provocative."

"I think that, more than any other "beautiful actress," Michelle has been handicapped by her appearance. She has such an overwhelming face that people have tended to cast her because of the way she looks... I have a feeling she's been in touch with her gift all along, and that she's exhibited enormous patience with those of us who tend to focus first on how gorgeous she is."

"Basically, she's a character actress... I think that's a strength. She's someone who will endure because she'll find characters to play. And she happens also to be a leading-lady type, which is, I guess, glamorous. She has both... I mean, is someone doing what they should be doing? That's the question."

"I didn't recognize her from one film to the next. I wasn't really looking at Michelle Pfeiffer; I was looking at the character in the movie. The thing that really clinched it was Married to the Mob. She had a kind of honesty in the character, and she had just the right amount of humor. She wasn't putting down the character; she wasn't making a value judgment on the character. She really was like the people I grew up with. The characters were Italians from Long Island, and here was an actress of a different type, different background, coming in and making me believe totally. That really made me sit up and take note. And then, when Dangerous Liaisons came out, I thought, 'She's the best we have.'"

"The only friend I trust not to distort or misuse what I say is Michelle Pfeiffer."

"She was kind of shy, and halfway through the year, in fact, it was the end of the second semester where the other kids had been doing the debating and making the fiery speeches and stuff, Michelle hadn't volunteered very much. But then we did the Harry Truman trial, where they bring in witnesses. The players had to get some other kids to participate, so a little peer pressure. Michelle ended up being one of the victims of the bomb. She gets on the stand, and she had dressed herself up as a victim and had gauze and everything. She starts to talk, and she starts crying. You ever been in a play or something where you feel kind of uncomfortable that all of a sudden someone's doing something so emotional you don't know what to do? She does that to the class. And they're looking, and they can't figure out. What the hell is she doing? She hasn't been like this all year. It was just a stunning performance. And we thought, God, she really is a victim of the bomb. To the end of the year, we had her take on some more responsibility. But that was the first little bit of acting."

"She had to have been a couple of years out of high school when I met her in Vons (it's a clothing store now) and I was only in El Toro by chance. When I saw her at the supermarket, there was a difference. Something had happened in there. I don't know if it's because she tried some other things. She had this steely look of determination. She looked at me, and she says, 'I'm gonna be an actress.' And I remember telling her, 'Now, Michelle, a lot of people have agents and wanna be an actress and...' And, 'No, no.' She told me there was this movie with Tony Danza, The Hollywood Knights. She was just trying out for it, and she thought she might have a chance for it. I give her that look, 'Now, Michelle.' I don't know. You'll see a kid coming through that'll tell you, 'I'm going to be a doctor.' They're just hell bent, they're sure that's what they're going to do. Nothing stops them from doing it. And some kids do that. And then I get a call, 'Hey, you gonna be in your room today?' And they come back, and they've just gotten their law degree from Harvard or something. And it's usually one of those kids who has that look. And she had that look... I was a single parent, and I was ironing at two o'clock in the morning. That's when I do my ironing and catch my breath. This movie comes on, The Hollywood Knights, and I'm thinking, trying to figure out where I heard that name. And I'm watching, and then Tony Danza and his girlfriend come by. And you do a double take. I go, 'Michelle?' Well, she got the part. I couldn't believe it. I'm thinking I got a student who got a role in a movie. Good for you. I'm watching it. You know, you're kind of proud of her. And there she is. It was a little role but she was good in it."

"I showed Stephen [Frears] a couple of reels of Married when he was considering Michelle for Liaisons. And he was clearly under her spell. But maybe he hesitated for an instant. He said, 'You know, she's going to be out there with John Malkovich and Glenn Close.' And I thought but didn't say, 'They'd better watch out then.'"

"She was very, very particular about the visual aspects of what we were doing. After seeing the first rushes of film, she requested that her costumes be made less splendid. In fact, we reduced things. But it also had to do with the fact that it's Michelle Pfeiffer's face. She was so beautiful that they had to tone down the glories of the gowns to make her less stunning."

"There was a pronunciation and approach that seemed Dylan-influenced. Vowels were swallowed, word endings were given short or no shrift. When we worked, it almost became a joke with us that I was constantly reminding her to say the consonants as well as the vowels... And Michelle, must you continue to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day?... I can swear that every single note in that movie was hers. Seeing Michelle up there was like watching myself or my daughter. I was so nervous. I wanted her to be so good. I didn't want to feel as if I'd let her down."

"She became a singer, and it was an extraordinary kind of example — graphic example — of what a good actor can really do, you know. She spent a lot of research time, she went around and heard singers and studied what they did. Everything from, of course, all the body language and all of that stuff — but vocally, we went in the studio and she sang a version of My Funny Valentine that, I mean... it killed me."

"A lot of times I looked into the camera and said, 'Too pretty.' We changed the lighting and hair. You know, she was hired originally in the town as a beautiful girl, but she's learned how to act. She's an actress of unlimited range. She works incredibly hard — the body language, the hair, the voice. She's not bothered by movie star stuff — whether she has a rug in her trailer or not. She doesn't care."

"Pfeiffer in particular takes the sort of glamorous yet preposterous part that generally defeats even the best actress and somehow contrives to make it credible every inch of the way."

"Alda's best-written character in the movie probably is Faith Healy, the sexy actress played by Pfeiffer. Her performance uses some wonderfully subtle touches, as she moves back and forth between her historical character and her distinctly more cynical modern one."

"Michelle Pfeiffer has the pivotal role of the movie and perhaps of her career as Angela de Marco, the unhappy missus of Frankie (The Cucumber). Shedding her WASP identity completely, Pfeiffer becomes the Italian princess, right down to the Long Island accent. Angela is an updated suburban moll, a gum-popper with press-on nails and lots of sweaters applique'd with feathers. She looks like a caricature, but there's anguish under all that mascara... This is her second movie marriage to the mob. As the wife in Scarface, she was the Latino mobster's WASP ornament, cold, trapped and tragic. As the Cucumber's widow, she's a deft comedian instead. It's her movie, and she graces it."

"For Pfeiffer, in a year that has seen her in varied assignments such as Married to the Mob and Tequila Sunrise, the movie is more evidence of her versatility. She is good when she is innocent and superb when she is guilty."

"This is one of the movies they will use as a document, years from now, when they begin to trace the steps by which Pfeiffer became a great star. I cannot claim that I spotted her unique screen presence in her first movie, which, I think, was Grease 2, but certainly by the time she made Ladyhawke and Tequila Sunrise and Dangerous Liaisons and Married to the Mob, something was going on. This is the movie of her flowering — not just as a beautiful woman, but as an actress with the ability to make you care about her, to make you feel what she feels. All of those qualities are here in this movie, and so is the "Makin' Whoopee" number, which I can only praise by adding it to a short list: whatever she's doing while she performs that song isn't merely singing; it's whatever Rita Hayworth did in Gilda and Marilyn Monroe did in Some Like It Hot, and I didn't want her to stop."

"Pfeiffer gives us the whole woman. Her triumph goes beyond her facility with the Russian accent; other actresses could have done that. She's great at playing contradictions, at being tough yet yielding, cloaked yet open, direct yet oblique. What's she's playing, we suspect, is the great Russian game of hide-and-seek. But Pfeiffer gives it a personal dimension. Katya holds herself in check, but her wariness, one senses, is as much personal as it is cultural -- the result, perhaps, of her own secret wounds. It's one of the year's most full-blooded performances."

"Pfeiffer's characterization of Lurene is a marvel, but by now that is only to be expected. Watching her discover new facets of her talent is one of the real pleasures of going to the movies these days... Pfeiffer has become one of those transparent actors, a performer who allows us direct access to her character's thoughts and feelings. This character is simply another in her wide-ranging gallery of vivid, complex women. She's fully alive up there on the screen: a grounded angel, tarnished, funny and exquisitely soulful, even when the movie is dead."

"Pfeiffer gives the performance of a lifetime as the outcast countess. With her hair in tight curls that accentuate her pale beauty, she seems lit from within."

"For any actress to make the transition from Catwoman to Ellen Olenska would be impressive, and that Pfeiffer succeeds here as she did in her last film is the most conclusive proof yet of her widening talents."

"This hit, that ice cold / Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold."

"Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium."

"To anyone who has spent a winter in the and known the depths to which the snow can reach, known the weeks when the stays below , the first hint of spring is a major event. You must live in the north to understand it. You cannot just come up for it as you might to Florida for the sunshine and the surf. To appreciate it, you must wait for it for a long time, hope and dream about it, and go through considerable enduring."

"s must be able to slide instantly into the water, cannot waste precious moments struggling over land. No creature is clumsier out of its element than this great diver of the north."

"... Here were young and with an occasional and a ground cover of , , and . I listened to the violin notes of a , the flutelike call of a , the teacher-teacher of an . Following one of the logging roads almost hidden with grass and cover, I flushed a partridge with a flock of well-grown chicks. A deer had walked across the trail, and I found the pellet of a . Here was food, abundant food — berries, buds, worms, insects and mice — and this was a place for living things."

"A new adventure is coming up and I'm sure it will be a good one."

"The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class."

"A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero."

"Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

"Even at the religious level the creationist view is a biased one. The only creation story they mention is the one in Genesis (in which there are actually two stories — the version in the first chapter being so different from that in the second chapter that biblical scholars believe they were written hundreds of years apart). Why do they not mention the belief of the Hindus that the world began with the creation of the cosmic egg? What about the Babylonians' belief that there was not a single creationist god but two cosmic parents?"

"But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere ... Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust? The truth or falsity of evolution is a secondary matter. Rationalists must listen to the complaints of the Fundamentalists with a psychiatrist's "third ear", and respond to the more subtle messages."

"Our desire to conserve wildlife for our children and our children's children forces us to bring out into the open conservation's secret question : Does God give a prize for the maximum number of human beings? Put another way, which shall we bequeath to our grandchildren : human life with nature, or human life without nature?"

"Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming. Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies. However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious. An attack on values is inevitably seen as an act of subversion."

"The overall system of a sizeable community struggling to survive in a crowded world may be either socialism or privatism. Either system may work, more or less. But, except in non-critical areas of distribution, commonism cannot possibly work for very long."

"Many of the environmentalists who moved into the environmental movement after Silent Spring ... detested pollution and craved purity. Absolute purity. They wanted to enforce zero tolerance on all environmental pollutants, not just on carcinogens. With friends like these the environment needs no enemies."

"A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future. By contrast, those who, for whatever reason, regard the resources at their disposal as an inheritance from the past that they feel obliged to pass on to their descendants, have a better chance of producing future generations prosperous enough to be able to continue to wrestle with the problems of increasing the quality of life."

"At this late date in the post-Christian Era, it might be questioned whether the Bible should even be brought into an ethical discussion. I argue that it should. Many people who do not explicitly call on the Bible for backing are nevertheless influenced by what they believe the Bible says. (Everyone knows about the Good Samaritan, even though they may not be able to remember what Samaritans in general were.) It is considered good form to speak politely of Scripture: revere it, but don't bother reading it seems to be the rule. Above all, don't read it thoughtfully."

"Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart."

"It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience."

"[I]f a pasture is run as a commons open to all, the right of each to use it is not matched by an operational responsibility to take care of it."

"The whole, though larger than any of its parts, does not necessarily obscure their separate identities."

"Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others."

"We have here the problem of bigness. Its lesson should by now have been burned into our memory by Brandeis. The Curse of Bigness' shows how size can become a menace – both industrial and social. It can be an industrial menace because it creates gross inequalities against existing or putative competitors. It can be a social menace – because of its control of prices. Control of prices in the steel industry is powerful leverage on our economy. For the price of steel determines the price of hundreds of other articles. Our price level determines in large measure whether we have prosperity or depression – an economy of abundance or scarcity. Size in steel should therefore be jealously watched. In final analysis, size in steel is the measure of the power of a handful of men over our economy. That power can be utilized with lightning speed. It can be benign or it can be dangerous. The philosophy of the Sherman Act is that it should not exist. For all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy. Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant. That is the philosophy and the command of the Sherman Act. It is founded on a theory of hostility to the concentration in private hands of power so great that only a government of the people should have it."

"The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion. As Chief Justice Hughes wrote in De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 365, 260, it is only through free debate and free exchange of ideas that government remains responsive to the will of the people and peaceful change is effected. The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes. Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, supra, 315 U.S. at pages 571-572, 62 S.Ct. at page 769, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. See Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, 262, 193, 159 A.L.R. 1346; Craig v. Harney, 331 U.S. 367, 373, 1253. There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.Terminiello, 337 U.S. at 4-5."

"Absolute discretion is a ruthless master. It is more destructive of freedom than any of man's other inventions."

"Our recent decisions make plain that we do not sit as a super-legislature to weigh the wisdom of legislation nor to decide whether the policy which it expresses offends the public welfare."

"We need to be bold and adventurous in our thinking in order to survive."

"We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."

"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom."

"The Congress, as well as the President, is trustee of the national welfare. The President can act more quickly than the Congress. The President with the armed services at his disposal can move with force as well as with speed. All executive power — from the reign of ancient kings to the rule of modern dictators — has the outward appearance of efficiency. Legislative power, by contrast, is slower to exercise. There must be delay while the ponderous machinery of committees, hearings, and debates is put into motion. That takes time; and while the Congress slowly moves into action, the emergency may take its toll in wages, consumer goods, war production, the standard of living of the people, and perhaps even lives. Legislative action may indeed often be cumbersome, time-consuming, and apparently inefficient. But as [[Louis Brandeis|Mr. Justice Brandeis] stated in his dissent in Myers v. United States, 272 U. S. 52, 293:"

"When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional right to free speech, it acts lawlessly; and the citizen can take matters in his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all."

"No matter what the legislature may say, a man has the right to make his speech, print his handbill, compose his newspaper, and deliver his sermon without asking anyone's permission. The contrary suggestion is abhorrent to our traditions."

"The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government."

"Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience … that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance."

"That seems to us to be the common sense of the matter; and common sense often makes good law."

"Literature should not be suppressed merely because it offends the moral code of the censor."

"Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don’t like, provided the matter relates to "sexual impurity" or has a tendency "to excite lustful thoughts". This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win."

"The Constitution favors no racial group, no political or social group."

"The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments could mean only one thing — one person, one vote."

"We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights -- older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions."

"We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government."

"These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will."

"The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton."

"Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole – a creature of ecclesiastical law – is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases....So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.""

"He was, however, speaking to a representative of government, the police. And it is to government that one goes 'for a redress of grievances,' to use an almost forgotten phrase of the First Amendment. But it is said that the purpose was 'to cause inconvenience and annoyance.' Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet."

"This case involves a cancer in our body politic. It is a measure of the disease which afflicts us. Army surveillance, like Army regimentation, is at war with the principles of the First Amendment. Those who already walk submissively will say there is no cause for alarm. But submissiveness is not our heritage. The First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our heritage. The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and expression, of the press, of political and social activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. The aim was to allow men to be free and independent and to assert their rights against government. There can be no influence more paralyzing of that objective than Army surveillance. When an intelligence officer looks over every nonconformist's shoulder in the library, or walks invisibly by his side in a picket line, or infiltrates his club, the America once extolled as the voice of liberty heard around the world no longer is cast in the image which Jefferson and Madison designed, but more in the Russian image."

"When man was first in the jungle, he took care of himself. When he entered a societal group, controls were necessarily imposed. But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas. That is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is the article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world."

"For there is no constitutional right for any race to be preferred... If discrimination based on race is constitutionally permissible when those who hold the reins can come up with "compelling" reasons to justify it, then constitutional guarantees acquire an accordion-like quality."

"The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone."

"The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market."

"One aspect of modern life which has gone far to stifle men is the rapid growth of tremendous corporations. Enormous spiritual sacrifices are made in the transformation of shopkeepers into employees... The disappearance of free enterprise has led to a submergence of the individual in the impersonal corporation in much the same manner as he has been submerged in the state in other lands."

"The law is not a series of calculating machines where answers come tumbling out when the right levers are pushed."

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. We need all the ingenuity we possess to avert the holocaust."

"These days I see America identified more and more with material things, less and less with spiritual standards. These days I see America acting abroad as an arrogant, selfish, greedy nation interested only in guns and dollars, not in people and their hopes and aspirations. We need a faith that dedicates us to something bigger and more important than ourselves or our possessions. Only if we have that faith will we be able to guide the destiny of nations in this the most critical period of world history."

"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.""

"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."

"The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend, one of the great landmarks in men's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized."

"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation."

"The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it."

"The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected."

"The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth."

"Christianity has sufficient inner strength to survive and flourish on its own. It does not need state subsidies, nor state privileges, nor state prestige. The more it obtains state support the greater it curtails human freedom."

"I've often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers."

"The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified."

"The Court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership."

"The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression, and obedience."

"It seemed to me that I had barely reached the Court when people were trying to get me off."

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."

"Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back."

"One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment, Potter."

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

"The continuing episodes of protest and dissent in the United States have their basis in the First Amendment to the Constitution, a great safety valve that is lacking in most other nations of the world. The First Amendment creates a sanctuary around the citizen’s beliefs. His ideas, his conscience, his convictions are his own concern, not the government’s."

"At the international level we have become virtually paranoid. The world is filled with dangerous people. Every troublemaker across the globe is a communist. Our obsession is in part the product of a fear generated by Joseph McCarthy. Indeed a black silence of fear possesses the nation and is causing us to jettison some of our libertarian traditions."

"But the fact that communists may have provoked some of the present dissent in the United States is not, as some would have it, the end of the matter. The voices are not communist, for those in rebellion see communism as an even more vicious form of a status quo. The merits must be voted up or voted down."

"The First Amendment was designed so as to permit a flowering of man and his idiosyncracies, but we have greatly diluted it. Although the Amendment says that Congress shall make ‘no law’ abridging freedom of speech and press, this has been construed to mean that Congress may make ‘some laws’ that abridge that freedom."

"A person may be convicted for making a speech or for pamphleteering if a judge rules ex post facto that the speaker or publisher created a ‘clear and present danger’ that his forbidden or revolutionary thesis would be accepted by a least some of the audience."

"But the case against the university is that it is chiefly a handmaiden of the state or of industry or, worse yet, of the military-industrial complex."

"When the university does not sit apart, critical of industry, the Pentagon, and government, there is no fermentative force at work in our society. The university becomes a collection of technicians in a service station, trying to turn out better technocrats for the technological society. Then all voices become a chorus supporting the status quo; there is no challenger from the opposition warning of dangers to come."

"A man's belief is his own; he is the keeper of his conscience; Big Brother has no rightful concern in these areas."

"Ideological data—like personality data—is treacherous when fed into a computer. For by its use the loyalty and security board’s failure or refusal to clear a person becomes a virtually incontestable ‘fact.’ All one has to do now is to press the ‘subversive’ button and all the names of ‘dangerous’ people come tumbling out."

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operations, to scientific advancement, and the like. The cause of privacy will be won or lost essentially in legislative halls and in constitutional assemblies. If it is won, this pluralistic society of ours will experience a spiritual renewal. If it is lost we will have written our own prescription for mediocrity and conformity."

"Electronic surveillance, as well as old-fashioned wire tapping, has brought Big Brother closer to everyone and has produced a like leveling effect… But the Administration soon broadened that category to include domestic groups who attempt to use unlawful means to ‘attack the existing structure of government.’ The Wall Street Journal sounded the alarm that such board surveillance ‘could lead to the harassment of lawful dissenters.’"

"There is more knowledge and information than ever before: the experts have so multiplied that man has a new sense of importance; man is indeed about to be delivered over to them. Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman."

"The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer."

"Yet more and more of the youth of America are instinctively horrified at the way President Johnson avoided all constitutional procedures and slyly maneuvered us into an Asian war. There was no national debate over a declaration of war. The lies and half-truths that were told, and the phony excuses gradually advanced, made most Americans dubious of the integrity of our leadership."

"If the war that comes is a nuclear conflict, the end of planetary life is probable. If it is a war with conventional weapons, bankruptcy is inevitable. Modern technological war is much too expensive to fight. Vietnam has bled our country at the rate of 2.5 billion dollars a month."

"We are witnessing, I think, a new American phenomenon. The two parties have become almost indistinguishable; and each is controlled by the Establishment."

"There always have been—and always will be—aggrieved persons. The lower their estate the more difficult it is to find a right to fit the wrong being done. Part of our problem starts at that point. In New York City a housing complaint must go to one of the nineteen bureaus that deal with those problems. It takes a sharp and energetic layman or lawyer to find the proper desk in the bureaucracy where the complaint must be lodged."

"Our militarism threatens to become more and more the dominant force in our lives. This is an inflammatory issue; and dissent on it will not be stilled."

"I believe it was Charles Adams who described our upside down welfare state as ‘socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.’ The great welfare scandal of the age concerns the dole we give rich people."

"The federal food program is not responsive to that growing need. It is designed by the agro-business lobby to restrict production, keep prices high, and assure profits to the producers. That lobby controls the Department of Agriculture, which as a result has made feeding the poor a subordinate and secondary function."

"We must realize that today's Establishment is the New George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution."

"[One of the] two completely evil men I have ever met."

"What I'm continuing to do is cutting out the equation that wastes the most amount of time — and that is working within the system."

"I wish I could do it again, only I wish I could take all of the animals out of the environmental fur farm ... I have absolutely no regrets, and I hope the same thing continues to happen at MSU and every other college campus that does animal research."

"You know, those people - I think they should appreciate that we're only targeting their property. Because frankly I think it's time to start targeting them."

"I’m a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation and as an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the “new world.” They were the ones who introduced disease. They were the ones who introduced alcoholism. They were the ones who introduced gunpowder and many, many things that led to our decimation."

"You're damn right when you say I've shown people how to make a firebomb, I've done my time for my crimes, and I should be able to talk about them."

"Don't ask me how to burn down a building. As me how to grow watermelons or how to explain nature to a child. that is what I want to grow old doing. Please afford me this."

"In my years past I have argued that economic sabotage was an appropriate tactic for our time. Like all strategists I have also been forced to recognize that times have changed and it is now my belief that the movements to protect earth and animals have achieved enough with this strategy to now consider an approach that does not compromise objectives, but increases the likelihood of real social change. Let our opposition who believe in violence carry the burden for its justification, but let those who believe in peace and love practice a way of life that our society sorely needs now more than ever."

"A realm of intimate, personal power is developing - power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."

"In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them."

"Information wants to be free. (Excerpted from: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."{{cite web"

"Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly."

"Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times."

"When environmentalists are wrong, it is frequently technology that they are wrong about, and they wind up supporting parochial Green goals at the cost of comprehensive ones. That happened with space technology, nuclear technology, and genetic engineering. If your default position on a new technology is suspicion, you forfeit the ability to deploy it for your own purposes. "The environmental movement has so far concentrated its attention upon the evils that technology has done rather than upon the good that technology has failed to do," says Freeman Dyson. But focusing on Green technological opportunity requires a shift in attitude toward novelty."

"Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility."

"Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?"

"Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfect, which time treats cruelly."

"Against the flow of constant entropy, maintenance people must swim always upstream, progresses against the current like a watchful trout. The only satisfaction they can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was."

"The house and its occupants mold to each other twenty-four hours a day, and the building accumulates the record of that intimacy."

""Stay hungry. Stay foolish." Whole Earth Catalog."

"I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. Whether it's going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. (I was) enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly."

"There's no other art form in the world that affects me more."

"I like my name. My parents were in the Uffizi Gallery looking at a Leonardo Da Vinci when my mom felt me kick. That's how I got my name. My parents were real hippies."

"Drugs? Every one has a choice and I choose not to do drugs."

"With Romeo and Juliet, you're talking about two people who meet one night, and get married the same night. I believe in love at first sight-but it hasn't happened to me yet."

"I'm absolutely clean. I've never tried anything. That's not a lie!."

"I'm not the sort of person who tries to be cool or trendy. I'm definitely an individual."

"I don't have emotions about a lot of things. I rarely get angry, I rarely cry. I guess I do get excited a lot, but I don't get sad and enormously happy."

""You learn after a while that it's not getting your face recognised that's the payoff. It's having your film remembered."

"I hate speaking in front of a large audience. I don't know where it came from...but its just this gut-wrenching fear of slipping up and doing something horrible."

"I’ve always kind of made sure to maintain the sense of who I am and never be mean or cruel or snotty to anyone. Because, at the end of the day, it's not going to help you last in the business, and who wants to be around someone like that? I don't want to turn into ‘that guy.’ That guy!"

"My God, no! I hate this whole hunk thing! I feel when I see myself in that, and these other cute faces, that I'm just part of this meat factory, like, 'Wow! Here's the hunk of the month! This month we're shoving Leonardo DiCaprio down your throat! Isn't he cute. Let's put him on the cover and we'll sell so many more magazines...' That's definitely not what I want to be, and I've tried real hard to get away from that whole situation."

"If you can do what you do best and be happy, you're further along in life than most people."

"The main thing for me right now is just to live my life with my family and friends. They treat me like Leo, not 'Leonardo, Master Thespian'. That's all I need to keep my sanity."

"The last thing I want to turn into is a fat Hollywood jerk. I was brought up without much money and I was happy. I don't think that I will strive for money or success and end up greedy or big-headed. That only leads to unhappiness. I can still be down-to-earth and do this job as long as I enjoy it."

"Don't think for a moment that I'm really like any of the characters I play. That's why it's called acting."

"It was pretty disheartening to be objectified like that. I wanted to stop acting for a little bit. But it changed my life in a lot of ways, but at the same time, I can't say that it didn't give me opportunities. It made me, for the first time, in control of my career. - On Titanic (1997)"

"One of my passions is to meet people and then imitate them. I love doing that."

"I have the same problem as Edward Furlong. I'm so thin!"

""I was behind a woman at the checkout counter who was looking at the magazines. She turned to me and goes, 'There he is again, that Leonardo DiCaprio. Don't you wish he'd just disappear?' I said, this is the moment where I either go, 'Do you know who I am?' or put my hat further down, pay for my corn-nuts and get out of there....I choose to avoid that. (2005)"

"I remember the casting session that I had where I was a break dancer, having this punk hair cut. They rejected me and I became really disillusioned with the business and said well this is what it's all about, and I haven't even got in to read a line. He said don't worry, some day we're going to get you back into this and it's going to happen for you, which I kind of took to heart. It was one of those situations where I was lucky and fortunate enough to be at the right places at the right time. All of a sudden I was on the set of Growing Pains and got this audition for This Boy's Life and was able to jump into the feature film world. It's really been just simply the fact that I'd been able to work, you know what I mean? I would probably still be trying to be an actor even if I was out of work, but I would probably become a little disillusioned at some point and move on to other things. But it's the one thing that I know that I love."

"I'm shy, but when the time comes to be wild, I'm fun-loving, adventurous, and mysterious."

"On his career: "I admit I've done a few lousy roles in the beginning of my career, like my role in Critters 3 (1991). But at that age, you'll do anything for attention!"

"All I know is that when you make a movie it's something you have to live with forever. It's not a job I take lightly."

"And I love doing what I'm doing and I'd get out of it if I hated it that much. I've said it many times before: There are much worse problems in the world, people dealing with things that are phenomenally more complicated."

"My mom and I lived at Hollywood and Western, a drug-dealer and prostitute corner. It was pretty terrifying. I got beat up a lot. I saw people have sex in the alleys. I remember I was five years old, and this guy with a trench coat, needles and crack cornered me. Early on, seeing the devastation on my block, seeing heroin addicts, made me think twice about ever getting involved in drugs. It's evil. Once you take that step and experiment, drugs can take over your life. You are not yourself anymore. That's something I never wanted. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. It was kind of just me and my parents. But because of them, the neighborhood did not have a bad effect on me. My dad introduced me to artists, and every few months we'd go to some hippie doo-dah parade as Mudmen in our underwear, carrying sticks and covered in mud. My mother did everything to get me into the best schools she could find."

"When I was young, I used to have this thing where I wanted to see everything. I used to think, 'How can I die without seeing every inch of this world?'"

"I don't have the guts that Romeo did. [on marriage]"

"Dark green is my favorite color. It's the color of nature and the color of money and the color of moss!"

"Certainly after Titanic, where my face was put on every magazine cover around the world and the movie was such a phenomenon, I really had no control over that. So for the last couple of years, media-wise I've been trying to regain some control in what people say about me."

"The challenge is to understand the psyche of somebody like that. There is no true genius or revolutionary ideas, I don’t think, without some element of compulsiveness or madness or obsession, and that’s certainly indicative of Howard Hughes. Understanding his obsessive-compulsive disorder was really the key for me for opening up who this man was."

"I think it’s a real danger, as an actor, when you try to make some statement through your career about what the business should be doing or ultimately what your image should be or how you want to be perceived. I look at every project that comes along and say, “Is this something I can sink my teeth into and can do a good job on?” That’s really how I choose roles."

"As a little kid growing up in Hollywood, I was called 'a little crazy'. And now I guess I'm still that way."

"The fact that Romeo is dopey, lovey-dovey, and it's a corny story. And I was afraid I'd look like a fuffy."

"A lot of actors ask me “what do you do? How do you get into the business?” My only answer is don’t be discouraged. … You have to commit your life to it, almost, and never give up. It’s a cliché, but it’s true."

""I wasn't surprised that Jamie got the award. But I knew that cameras would be stuffed up my face so I had my response ready. Anyone who says they don't practice is a liar." -on losing out on the Oscar to Jamie Foxx during the 2005 Academy Awards."

"On turning 30: "I kind of feel like the same person except more time has gone by. I hate to say that I feel like an adult now. I have to admit I wish I was still 18. After all, even through the time while I was representing that wild kid, I really wasn't. I was just living my life. I was just not making movies at the time."

"On Martin Scorsese: Martin has brought so much to the art form of film, and he is not the type of person who would be upset by not receiving an Oscar, although it is a practical joke that he has not won an Academy Award after all these years. Whatever opinions critics will have of The Aviator, I really think that this is a great piece of art: once again, he has made a great classic film."

"I like to help the whales, the otters, and the dolphins. When I`m acting and I take a break, the first thing on my list is spending time by the sea."

"I lived in Hollywood and, ironically, I didn't know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions and try and become an actor, I thought it was like a Masonic thing, like a blood line you had to belong to - until I was 13. Then I realised what you had to do. It is the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life."

"As an actor, you're constantly searching for that great character. Also, being a history buff and learning about people in our past and amazing things that they've done, I came across a book about Howard Hughes and he was set up as basically, the most multi-dimensional character I could ever come across. Often, people have tried to define him in biographies, but no one seems to be able to categorize him."

"On rumors: I've heard some pretty bad rumors...that I'm gay. If I want to go to a party with a few male friends, it doesn't mean that I'm gay. I don't see why I can't have friends of both sexes without rumors being spread about me. It's crazy."

"If you hear of any incident about me - a fight, a change of clothes, a little extra gel in the hair, don't believe it till you talk to me."

"Well it's a risk to do a movie of this calibre on a subject matter and a point in history people are not very familiar with. It's a tough subject to sell - so salary-wise you have to make sacrifices to make a certain film happen. I would have been an idiot to pass up the opportunity to work with Mr Scorsese."

"I’ve been in the business since I was 16, so I’ve had a 14-year career. I’ve always had acting in my blood. Doing this, whatever it is, was something I was drawn to since my earliest memories. Ironically, I lived in Hollywood, but never understood that all it took was getting an agent and being persistent."

"On whether there are any aspects of fame he dislikes: You kidding? I feel very fortunate. A lot of people would love to be in my position. There are so many people out there who are suffering trillions of times more than I could ever suffer, and would love to be me. I am a lucky little bastard."

"Everywhere I go, somebody is staring at me. I don`t know if people are staring because they recognize me or because they think I`m a weirdo."

"I'm probably not going to get married unless I live with somebody for 10 or 20 years. But these people (Romeo and Juliet) took a chance and they did it. We don't have the balls that Romeo did."

"The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it. It`s a great outlet. As for myself, I`m not sure who I am. It seems that I change every day."

"Being dubbed as a hunk sort of annoys me. It gives me a yucky feeling."

"I got attention by being funny at school, pretending to be retarded, and jumping around with a deformed hand."

"School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn."

"I prefer ordinary girls - you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with a girl, it doesn't mean we are dating."

"On working with Martin Scorsese in Gangs of New York (2002): "He's a perfectionist, obsessed with detail. That's why he went over budget and over schedule."

"I don't really have many extravagances. I don't fly private jets and I don't have bodyguards and I don't buy crazy things. I have a couple of houses here and there. I bought a very expensive watch, and I am going to buy a really expensive movie poster, the original for The Thief of Bagdad (1940). I love movie posters."

"A consensus has emerged in our scientific community that global warming is no longer merely a theory but a reality, a crisis with truly global implications for planet Earth and all of us who share it. - Told to thousands at the New Jersey concert for Live Earth"

"There are pros and cons to everything. To be able to do what I do and what I love on this level is a very positive thing. There are certain invasions of privacy, but I hate sitting around complaining about it, I just don't like to hear it come out of my mouth. I'm a very fortunate person being able to do what I do."

""People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall."

"Brothers don`t necessarily have to say anything to each other-they can sit in a room and be together and just be completely comfortable with each other."

"Love at first sight? I absolutely believe in it! You`ve got to keep the faith. Who doesn`t like the idea that you could see someone tomorrow and she could be the love of your life? It`s very romantic."

"Yes, I can play younger than my age. But I can play characters older than I am, too. I`m not an actor who can just play the kid."

"People always like to make up stories. I am not planning on getting married. Then again, I might wake up tomorrow and decide to get married!"

"I insist on keeping a level head. I`ve maintained the same exact home life that I`ve had for 20 years. All I see is more people looking at me than before. But, you know, who cares? You just can`t obsess yourself with this fame stuff."

"I've been very lucky to have achieved a lot of the things that I dreamt of achieving as a young man. But, at the end of the day – and I truly believe this – it is not about achieving great wealth or success. Because they don't bring happiness ultimately. They really don't. What matters is whether or not you've fulfilled the idea of having led an interesting life, whether you've contributed in some way to the world around you."

"As an Academy member, you're not allowed to endorse somebody else when they're up for an Academy Award and if you do, there's a good chance you'll lose your membership. But I have to tell you Leo DiCaprio is so amazing in The Revenant"

"We were peers, I think. Leo's an incredibly intelligent guy who's been through a great amount of life experience over the course of the last few years. He's very dedicated and I think he had a very good idea of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it."

"He reminds me of that excitement when De Niro and I stumbled upon a way of working together - a similar kind of energy to the actors in the 1970s. It’s very rare for me to find that kind of connection again. Leo will give me the emotion where I least expect it and could only hope for it about three or four scenes. And he can do it take after take.""

"You know, I worked with Leonardo when he was 18 [on The Quick and the Dead]. He was a virgin, and he would talk about that constantly. So I'm hoping we have some time so he can fill in what's happened in between. Maybe show some photos. Because I'm sure life's different now."

"DiCaprio is both a famous actor and perhaps the world’s best-known climate activist. He doesn’t speak on the subject of carbon emissions so much as he preaches. “Humans have put our entire existence into jeopardy,” DiCaprio thunders. Climate change is “the most urgent threat facing our entire species.” Those who question climate policy, he declares, should be banned from public office. “The scientific consensus is in, and the argument is now over.” Few preachers live up to the standards they set from the pulpit, and DiCaprio is no exception. In the summer of 2016, DiCaprio was scheduled to receive an award from the environmental group Riverkeeper. He was in Cannes attending the film festival at the time, so he chartered a private jet to fly from France to New York and back. That’s an eight-thousand-mile round-trip, which in addition to being physically exhausting, amounts to a gargantuan carbon footprint, bigger than the average African might emit in a lifetime. For DiCaprio, it was just another Cannes Film Festival. The year before, he was photographed off the coast of France meandering alone on the deck of a 450-foot, $200 million yacht, which he’d rented as an accommodation for the week. Once again, a lot of carbon."

"His two eyes are different," says Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Leo in what may be his best movie, What's Eating Gilbert Grape. "The left eye is very soft and empathetic. The right eye is more analyzing. One eye oozes warmth, while the other is more penetrating. One eye is psyche, the other is intellect."

"He's probably the world's most beautiful-looking man, yet he doesn't think that he's gorgeous. And to me, he's just smelly, farty Leo."

"With those eyes and his intellect, I see no real limit to his potential."

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."

"I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years."

"Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west."

"How could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions—gravity and livable temperature range between freezing and boiling—have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place"... gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind."

"If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment."

"I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again."

"The Sioux idea of living creatures is that trees, buffalo and men are temporary energy swirls, turbulence patterns ... that’s an early intuitive recognition of energy as a quality of matter. But that’s an old insight, you know, extremely old—probably a Paleolithic shaman’s insight. You find that perception registered so many ways in archaic and primitive lore. I would say that it is probably the most basic insight into the nature of things, and that our more common, recent Occidental view of the universe as consisting of fixed things is out of the main stream, a deviation from basic human perception."

"Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion."

"The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear. ... The “free world” has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated and hatred which has no outlet. ... They create populations of “preta” — hungry ghosts, with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, the forests and all animal life are being consumed by these cancerous collectivities; the air and water of the planet is being fouled by them."

"The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer."

"The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both."

"Historically, Buddhist philosophers have failed to analyze out the degree to which ignorance and suffering are caused or encouraged by social factors. ... Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion."

"The national polities of the modern world maintain their existence by deliberately fostered craving and fear."

"Toni Morrison and I and Leslie Marmon Silko traveled through China together five years ago, with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Francine du Plessix Gray...Ginsberg and Snyder are Buddhists. Gary Snyder had that book, Cold Mountain Poems, and we went to the Cold Mountain Monastery where he presented the poems to the monks that were there. And there was a painting on the wall that was the same painting that was in his book, which he identified with. And it felt really good because though the Chinese have wiped out the temples, his temple was still there."

"I am struck by how much we talk about rebirthing but never about rebearing. The word itself is unfamiliar to most people. Yet both women and men are capable of rebearing, women literally and men metaphorically. A door opens just by changing the name. We don't have to be reborn; we can rebear. This is part of the writer's job, either to rebear the metaphors or refuse to use them. Gary Snyder's lifelong metaphor is watershed. How fruitful that is!"

"the actual writing was probably a year and a half, but the getting ready to be able to write it was three or four years, roughly. I was kind of getting my head in place. (“How did you do that?”) I don't know. It's underground material. It's what Gary Snyder calls "composting." You know, stuff has to go down inside of you, get into the dark and turn into something else, before you can use it in art. If you use raw experience, straight experience, you're doing journalism which is another discipline."

"People like Rothenberg and, of course, Gary Snyder perfected the "white shamanism" movement. The attitude of the white shaman is that he knows more about Indians than the Indians know."

"I admire Gary Snyder and his ecological commitment very much."

"Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs."

"The peak of the [Presidential] campaign happened in Albuquerque, where a local reporter said to me, "Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate or are you just running on the issues?""

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable."

"The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological–social–psychological–economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch."

"Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it."

"The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them."

"Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it's a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it's a social system, watch it work. Learn its history."

"Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others."

"And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system's actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. (The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town?)"

"Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there."

"Pretending you're in control even when you aren't is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What's appropriate when you're learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it's leading."

"If I could, I would add an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information."

"Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable."

"Don't be stopped by the "if you can't define it and measure it, I don't have to pay attention to it" ploy. No one can [precisely] define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can [precisely] define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist."

"Seeing systems whole requires more than being "interdisciplinary," if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct."

"Expand the boundary of caring."

"Systems thinking can only tell us to do these things. It can't do them for us. And so we are brought to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap. But it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond—to what can and must be done by the human spirit."

"A system is a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. [...] The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior!"

"Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away. Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents – preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away. Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems – undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it."

"If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment but allocates little money or efforts toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government's purpose. Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals."

"In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants."

"Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways."

"That very large system, with interconnected industries responding to each other through delays, entraining each other in their oscillations, and being amplified by multipliers and speculators, is the primary cause of business cycles. Those cycles don't come from presidents, although presidents can do much to ease or intensify the optimism of the upturns and the pain of the downturns. Economies are extremely complex systems; they are full of balancing feedback loops with delays and they are inherently oscillatory."

"Whenever we see a growing entity, whether it be a population, a corporation, a bank account, a rumor, an epidemic, or sales of a new product, we look for the reinforcing loops that are driving it and for the balancing loops that ultimately will constrain it. We know those balancing loops are there, even if they are not yet dominating the system's behavior, because no real physical system can grow forever. [...] An economy can be constrained by physical capital or monetary capital or labor or markets or management or resources or pollution."

"Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability."

"There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits."

"Changing the length of a delay may utterly change behavior. [...] Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays."

"Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have. But they don't have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system. [...] We don't even interpret perfectly the imperfect information that we do have, say behavioral scientists. [...] Which is to say, we don't even make decisions that optimize our own individual good, much less the good of the system as a whole."

"Economic theory as derived from Adam Smith assumes first that homo economicus acts with perfect optimality on complete information, and second that when many of the species homo economicus do that, their actions add up to the best possible outcome for everybody. Neither of these assumptions stands up long against the evidence."

"These examples confuse effort with result, one of the most common mistakes of this kind is designing systems around the wrong goal. Maybe the worst mistake this kind has been the adoption of the GNP as the measure of national economic success. [...] If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency."

"Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don't count the costs – among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, and so on – the whole list of problems that we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, very different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth. The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing it with all their might in the wrong direction."

"Power over the rules is real power. That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution – the rules for writing the rules – has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them."

"Even people within systems don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. "To make profits", most corporations would say, but that's just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more and more under the control of the corporation, so that its operations becomes ever more shielded from uncertainty."

"The shared idea in the mind of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society's paradigm, or deepest beliefs about how the world works. [...] people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems."

"How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing?"

"Why are they [people] more likely to listen to people who tell them they can't make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?"

"You've seen how information holds system together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision-makers can respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can't respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. [...] Information is power."

"Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can't measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality."

"No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. [...] But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist."

"The least obvious part of a system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior."

"A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes the system likely to oscillate."

"In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving growth and at least one balancing feedback loop constraining growth, because no system can grow forever in a finite environment."

"There always will be limits to growth."

"A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time."

"When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential."

"The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole."

"When asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she'd always say that we have exactly enough time – starting now."

"Mesarovic and Pestel are critical of the Forrester-Meadows world view, which is that of a homogeneous system with a fully predetermined evolution in time once the initial conditions are specified."

"The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity."

"I'm the least-educated person in my immediate family. My two other brothers have multiple advanced degrees, and I only have one. [...] Actually, now that I've got a Nobel Prize, I feel equal."

"I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, “That’s nice — and when are you going to see me next?”"

"Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve. As an elected official, I know that fighting for what is just is not always popular but it is necessary; that is the real challenge that public servants face and it is where courage counts the most. Without courage, our action or inaction results in suffering of the few and injustice for all."

"When she has to reach agreement she will … And if she doesn't have to reach agreement she won't."

"The end of the occupation. The right of return of the Palestinian people. These are critical dividing lines in human rights. We have to be here. No American would put up with an Israeli-style occupation of their hometown for 53 days let alone 54 years. US tax dollars are funding violence against people of color inside the US borders and outside the US borders."

"If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will never be built. The upside is that we don’t have to be perfect to save our communities and restore the Earth. We just have to try hard and be as honest as we can be about the processes we are going through. So I share the mistakes and failures, as well as the successes, because that is the truth of my journey – and of anyone’s journey."

"Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things."

"Bernie's particular brand of socialism is probably better described as 'grandparent envy.'"

"Look. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not taking the same exam. I think it bothers people. They're not taking the same exam. He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless. That's what's unfair. That's what's unfair tonight. They're not taking the same exam. Look, she has policies. She may not articulate them perfectly every time. She may not put the stories in the right places. But she's fighting for actual ideas that will help real people. And he's talking about people's penises. And so, they are not taking the same exam. And that's pissing people off. It's pissing me off."

"The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance."

"We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake."

"The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence — and eventually falling through that hole ourselves."

"The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism."

"To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people."

"A green economy begins to replace some of the clunking and chugging of ugly machines with the wise effort of beautiful, skilled people. That means more jobs."

"Van Jones explained, "We are in the middle of a very rare convergence. Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, were stuck on stupid for thirty years, chasing each other off a cliff to put more and more people in prison. The way you way you showed you were a smart politician was you tried to one-up your opponent on how many people you wanted to put behind bars for petty offenses. And so, three strikes and you're out; two strikes and you're out; just, hey, if you're black, you're out-that became politics for both parties. Bill Clinton was a mass incarcerator. Let's not forget that""

"6 ppl hold > wealth than the bottom 50% of America. There's more wealth inequality today than any time since the gilded age. Biden accepted the most billionaire $ in the primary. They're paying him to reject MedicareForAll in a pandemic. Imagine not being mad at billionaires."

"Yoshitani is part of a vibrant activist scene in the San Francisco Bay Area that is ground zero of the green jobs movement most prominently championed by former Obama advisor Van Jones."

"Van Jones got fired because he became the Scary Negro of the Week on Fox News, where, let's be honest, they still feel threatened by Harry Belafonte."

"What got Van Jones fired was they caught him on tape saying that Republicans are assholes. And they call it "news." And Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to."

"Jones may well be more effective outside the administration than within it (I think Beck put it as "dangerous." Semantics.) As Ariana Huffington opined in a post September 7 called "Thank You, Glenn Beck!" (The Huffington Post), Van Jones was undeniably the best person for this job, but the job wasn't best for him. Van Jones is not someone who ought to be stuck behind a desk, calculating tax credits and guarding his opinions from the 24-hour news-culture vultures."

"Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically."

"The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past."

"The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler, is entirely without basis in fact, and the little dark native lives amid the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship."

"Race feeling may be called prejudice by those whose careers are cramped by it, but it is a natural antipathy which serves to maintain the purity of type. The unfortunate fact that nearly all species of men interbreed freely leaves us no choice in the matter. Either the races must be kept apart by artificial devices of this sort, or else they ultimately amalgamate, and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails."

"The continuity of physical traits and the limitation of the effects of environment to the individual only are now so thoroughly recognized by scientists that it is at most a question of time when the social consequences which result from such crossings will be generally understood by the public at large. As soon as the true bearing and import of the facts are appreciated by lawmakers, a complete change in our political structure will inevitably occur, and our present reliance on the influences of education will be superseded by a readjustment based on racial values."

"This [the Mediterranean] is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phoenicia including Carthage, of Etruria and of Mycenaean Greece. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman State."

"One of its [the First World War’s] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe … This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul."

"Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man. The Berbers of north Africa to-day are racially identical with the Spaniards and south Italians."

"Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say 'nature,' I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it."

"An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is 'nature,' the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental 'damage.' But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces—the wind, the rain, the sun—were too strong, too elemental. But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life... could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts...We have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature."

"The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse—the analogy is accurate. But it's more than that. We have built a greenhouse, 'a human creation' where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."

"The expected effects of a sea-level rise typify the many consequences of a global warming. On the one hand, they are so big we literally can't understand them. If there is a significant polar melting, the Earth's center of gravity will shift, tipping the globe in such a way that the sea level might actually drop at Cape Horn and along the coast of Iceland—I read this in a recent EPA report and found that I didn't really understand what it meant to tip the Earth, through I was awed by the idea. On the other hand, the changes ultimately acquire a quite personal dimension: Should I put in a wall in front of my house? Does this taste salty to you? And, most telling of all, the human response to the problems, the utterly natural human attempt to preserve the old natural way of life in this postnatural world, creates entirely new consequences. The ocean rises; I build a wall; the marsh dies, and, with it, the fish."

"We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information."

"It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided."

"Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky."

"They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips."

"These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together."

"Right now, plenty of people feel the peacefulness of their lives degraded by sprawl, or worry about the way consumerism has eroded the quality of our communities. For them, the idea of enough is not completely alien or distasteful, though it remains difficult to embrace. We've been told that it's impossible – that some force like evolution drives us on to More and Faster and Bigger. 'You can't stop progress.' But that's not true. We could choose to mature. That could be the new trick we share with each other, a trick as revolutionary as fire. Or even the computer."

"The logic of divestment couldn't be simpler: if it's wrong to wreck the climate, it's wrong to profit from that wreckage."

"If it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage."

"...as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming....Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns....The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt."

"ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.... But though we know now that behind the scenes Exxon understood precisely what was going on, in public they feigned ignorance or worse.... Thanks to Exxon’s willingness to sucker the world, that world is now a chaotic mess."

"Year after year throughout the last two decades they’ve made more money than any company in the history of money. But poor people around the world are already paying for those profits, and every generation that follows us now will pay as well, because the “Exxon position” has helped take us over one tipping point after another. Their sins of emission, like so many other firms and individuals, are bad. But their sins of omission are truly inexcusable."

"Consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high."

"If we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most."

"A team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years... “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors."

"But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier[,] and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.”"

"The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all... the most likely scenarios...are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean... Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down..."

"Single most important stat on the planet: CO2 rose 3.5 parts per million last year, 2nd-highest annual rise on record. This is legit scary"

"The longer I think about @DNC insisting no-one hold a climate debate, the sillier it seems. We've literally never talked about this issue in a presidential debate, and we literally have to deal with it immediately. I don't understand why we shouldn't devote a night to it."

"What do Ben and Jerry’s, an 800,000-member South African trade union, countless college professors, a big chunk of Amazon’s Seattle workforce, and more high school students than you can imagine have in common? They’re all joining in a massive climate strike this coming Friday, September 20 — a strike that will likely register as the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history."

"On May 23, at the end of the last massive school strike, Thunberg and 46 other youth activists released an open letter to The Guardian urging adults to join in next time. Because, as they pointed out, there are limits to what young people can do on their own. If you can’t vote, and if you don’t own stocks, then your ability to pull the main levers of power is limited. They wrote: “Sorry if this is inconvenient for you. But this is not a single-generation job. It’s humanity’s job.”"

"So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die? Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization... The pandemic provides some useful sense of scale—some sense of how much we’re going to have to change to meet the climate challenge."

"Fair or not, boomers and the Silent Generation have about 70% of the country’s money, compared with about 5% for millennials. So if you want to push around Washington, or Wall Street, or your state capital, it helps to have some people with hairlines like mine."

"[D]ata from the World Meteorological Agency show that, as the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, told the {COP28} global climate talks in Dubai last week, we can safely say, even with weeks to go, that 2023 will take the title {as the world's hottest year on record}. . . . And yet . . . [a]lmost simultaneous with the breakout in temperature, there was a breakout in the installation of renewable energy, especially solar power, around the world. . . . {T}he cost of clean energy has dropped so far that it is now possible that saving the planet might be a corollary of saving cash. This ongoing drop in price is more than a decade old, but sometime in the past few years it crossed an invisible line, making it cheaper than hydrocarbons, and this was the year when that reality finally translated into dramatic action on the ground. . . . There are plenty of other technologies we’re [currently] spending money on, including small nuclear reactors and giant carbon-sucking machines, that may or may not someday play a role in the climate fight, but, for all the furor they produce, they seem unlikely to make much difference anytime soon. In the next few years, while the planet’s climate system teeters on the edge of breaking, it’s sun, wind, and batteries that matter. They’re cheap, and they’re ready."

"Think about what your town is doing about environmental pollution before you go to Washington with radical environmentalist Bill McKibben to get arrested. I mean no lack of deference to McKibben or his followers. But there is plenty of work to go around, as all the movements that came after 1963 - women's, anti-war, and LGBTQ -- and gained power from the example that was set during the 1963 March on Washington, still show us."

"Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era."

""We had no money and no organization, so we figured we'd be doing well if we could organize a hundred of these things by April 14. And that would have been about a hundred more global warming rallies than there had been," he told Democracy Now! Instead, McKibben tapped a rich vein of discontent around the United States. "People were really eager to finally be able to take action about this," said the amazed activist, "and the thing has just kinda exploded." More than fourteen hundred Step It Up rallies took place in all fifty states in April 2007. McKibben followed with another Step It Up Day seven months later, which involved hundreds of thousands of people around the country, including eighty members of Congress."

"I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending."

"McKibben understands that a central goal of movement leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers."

"Bill McKibben, a leading champion in the fight against climate change"

"Bill McKibben has long said, when people ask him what's the most significant thing you can do for the climate, "Stop being an individual; join something.""

"I changed my name when I was about twelve because I didn't like being called Sue or Susie. I felt I needed a longer name because I was so tall. So what happened? Now everyone calls me Sig or Siggy."

"I had such great teachers in high school who made me feel like I could do anything. Then to go to Yale, where these drama teachers made me feel like shit—if I have any advice for young people, it would be, "Don't listen to teachers who say, 'You're really not good enough.' " Just teach me. Don't tell me if you think I'm good enough or not. I didn't ask you. Teachers who do that should be fired."

"I’d send out an intergalactic invitation to other species. I guarantee they would not be like the aliens in the movies I did. I think if they can get here, they could be charming. Stephen Hawking said aliens would be coming for our resources. Well, I don’t know what planet he’s talking about, we don’t have any resources to give them! We’re plundering our own planet. Unless garbage and plastic is something they need, in which case, we could work out a good deal."

"There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and con-front the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien."

"I feel very complete about her. I think she`s more vulnerable. I think she is truly alone. It`s very interesting to play a character who is truly alone, especially a woman, because women are always seen in relation to men or to other woman. It was a very-not to put our audience off-but it was a very existential situation in many ways."

"I guess I don`t think of film as an innovative medium. I guess I feel that film kind of caught up to what`s been happening to women for the last 20 years."

"With the `60s and the `70s, television gave people a real appetite for violence and slickness. And, for a long time, there was a reluctance to put women in that world. Now, we`ve sort of forced our way in-and I don`t think we`re going to leave."

"(Ripley is) open, honest and tries to do the right thing. I've always played Ripley as an ordinary person who is in extraordinary circumstances, and doesn't give up. I'm not playing a strong feminist statement; I'm playing this woman who has no one else to rely on."

"It was never important to me to display my sexuality. I didn't feel like I had to prove I was a babe to anyone. So I think maybe I always took parts based on the story and director, and very rarely on what the character was. (The roles) I get offered (are) isolated women. . . . It is easier for them to see me as a woman on my own. I can have a token love story, but in the end I'm gonna be this strong woman. Maybe it's harder for them to see me in a couples situation."

"I would rather have stayed in the theater and done comedy. Comedy in film (was) so narrow for women. I was much happier doing very black comedy onstage, and I could never find anything of that ilk on film. The closest to what I might have accomplished was `Working Girl.'"

"Weaver has been struggling with forms of acceptance all her life. The daughter of British actress Elizabeth Inglis and former NBC president Sylvester (Pat) Weaver (he created both the "Today" and "Tonight" shows), Susan Weaver (she adopted the name Sigourney at age 14, from a character in "The Great Gatsby") was reared a child of privilege on Manhattan's upper East Side. But Weaver never felt entirely comfortable with her upbringing. She decided to do a 180 from her expected role in life: during her stay at Stanford University, where she majored in English, Weaver was part of a theater troupe that protested the Vietnam War. She also took to wearing an elf suit, and lived with her boyfriend in a tree house. "It was very natural," says Weaver. "I had a boyfriend, we both played the flute, we made our own clothes. We certainly didn't attract more attention than anyone else around us.""

"Quickly, in one glance, you begin to understand why, as a tall girl, she was called Amazon by her boarding-school classmates and why, as a beautiful girl, she resented it -- so much so that by her father's account, she went and changed her name from Susan to the more stylish Sigourney, lifting it from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story."

"I prefer not to have any image, or any one image," she says, now curled on a couch in a suite at the hotel and sheathed in black, one shoulder bared. "It's because I come from the theater originally. My dream, when I was a young actor, was to be in a repertory company, where you could play the maid in one piece and then play the leading lady in another, and go from comedy to drama and really hop all over the place. And I actually realized a long time ago that you can't expect anything to happen; you can't expect anyone else to know what you want, where you want to go next. So I guess what I'm always doing is trying to create this mini-rep company in my head."

"People don't remember that Sigourney has been one of the first serious actors able to piece together a career that incorporated every aspect of the movie-making spectrum," Mr. Schamus says. "People thought that Bruce Willis had broken that ground in Pulp Fiction. Excuse me? She's been doing this all her life."

"Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?"

"Any future which is not beautiful is unacceptable."

"No future can be beautiful which involves an economy that violates the rights of future generations, that degrades fundamental planetary systems in any way, or that fails to offer every human being a basic share of safety, dignity and happiness."

"The future starts now."

"Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience."

"We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. … Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible."

"We have to develop a model of prosperity that 4.5 billion more people can share and we don't know how to do it."

"To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs."

"Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems."

"My other car is a bright green city."

"The answer to the problem of the American car is not under its hood. ...The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car but to eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go."

"In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if that is, perhaps, one of the things which make makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere."

"When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman."

"Outside a million windows, a million birds had sung as morning swept around the globe. Few men and few women were so glad that a new day had dawned as these birds seem to be.... We are likely to awake with an "Oh, dear!" on our lips; they with a "What fun!" in their beaks.""

"One of the problems with fame … is they try to pigeonhole you… like I’m stuck with The Greening of America for the rest of my life."

"If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today. … I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means."

"My goal in life is to make people think. If I do that, I've been a success."

"America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut."

"There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. This is the revolution of the new generation."

"The logic and necessity of the new generation — and what they are so furiously opposed to — must be seen against a background of what has gone wrong in America. It must be understood in light of the betrayal and loss of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960's, and the way in which that State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man. Its rationality must be measured against the insanity of existing "reason" — reason that makes impoverishment, dehumanization, and even war appear to be logical and necessary. Its logic must be read from the fact that Americans have lost control of the machinery of their society, and only new values and a new culture can restore control. Its emotions and spirit can be comprehended only by seeing contemporary America through the eyes of the new generation."

"We seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants."

"To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost."

"The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism."

"Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth."

"The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power."

"Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them."

"The great crime of our time, says Vonnegut, was to do too much good secretly, too much harm openly."

"The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values."

"What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it."

"Organizations are not really "owned" by anyone. What formerly constituted ownership was split up into stockholders' rights to share in profits, management's power to set policy, employees' right to status and security, government's right to regulate. Thus older forms of wealth were replaced by new forms."

"It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil."

"The end result of this personal and public impoverishment is a hollow man."

"One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something that he has and then sell him something to take its place."

"Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community."

"Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions."

"Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society."

"The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves."

"Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up."

"A work of art is not valued because it changes itself for each person who views it, it retains its own integrity and thus means something unique and marvelous to those who see it."

"Of all the qualities of human beings that are injured, narrowed, or repressed in the Corporate State, it is consciousness, the most precious and the most fragile, that suffers the most."

"Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us."

"We do not see it because we can not afford to-because the truth is too explosive."

"there is every reason to fear that the State is growing ever more powerful, more autonomous, more indifferent to its own inhabitants."

"One of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties."

"The crucial fact to realize about all the powerful machinery of the Corporate State — its laws, structure, political system — is that it possesses no mind."

"Our history shows that what we must do is assert domination over the machine, to guide it so that it works for the values of our choice."

"Surely this new age is not a repudiation of, but a fulfillment of, the American dream. What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live?"

"No person's gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else's gain."

"Once a person reaches Consciousness III, there is no returning to a lower consciousness."

"The country we live in is a laboratory. We have one experiment after another. Unfortunately, it is not a laboratory where no one gets hurt: some lives are enhanced, others are ruined. We have to view our society with concern and passion, and see what we can learn from each of our experiments. When we get upset and angry about politics — whether it is conservative, liberal, or whatever — we tend to think in terms of right and wrong, not what we can learn."

"As Reagan conservatism is becoming less popular, people are asking: Where do we go from here? We can also ask: Does the last era of liberalism provide any indications as to where we might or should go from here? The liberalism of the nineteen-thirties emerged after the catastrophe that resulted from the conservatism of the nineteen-twenties. Conservatives had been in power for a long time, and ended by nearly wrecking the country. Liberals came along and performed a rescue operation. Ironically, they are credited with saving the establishment, which they surely did."

"The liberals were wide-ranging in their interests, ready to question the orthodoxies of the time, and looking for new horizons. It is always difficult to find people like that, but it is even more difficult today. The liberals of the nineteen-thirties were diverse, but they had a common vision. They accepted democracy, the free market, and capitalism. However, they thought that unless the market was not corrected or ameliorated, there would be child labor, neglect of the elderly, dangerous and harmful consumer goods, monopolies squeezing people out of business and forcing down wages — in short, there would be the horror of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution before the British began passing social legislation."

"The liberals were right when they insisted that we had enough food and goods for all of our people. But they did not — and we still do not — know how to distribute those goods in a rational way. We have failed to figure out how to turn this abundance into an advantage. The liberals were also right about labor-saving. If we evenly distributed the work that needs to be done, there ought to be a lot of time left over for everybody to have the leisure that people need. But we have managed to reverse that. Today, a great many people cannot find any work. People are dispossessed and cannot support themselves or their families. Many are homeless. For many others, work has become a rat race: something to be endured, not enjoyed. Today we are witnessing an impoverishment: the apparent drying up of resources for all kinds of things that are badly needed. We seem to have no money for housing, for education, or for health and social services. And yet we have a deficit, and we are told by candidates for public office that we must cut the federal budget even more. This impoverishment is a mystery."

"Liberals placed an unreasonable amount of faith in large institutions: unions, foundations, big government, large corporations, and universities. These institutions are based on principles that are antithetical to democracy. They are not democratic, they are hierarchical: Someone is at the top and everybody else is at the bottom. Their policies are not made democratically, they are made at the top. These institutions are also not egalitarian. They operate by administrative discretion and authority, not the rule of law: There is no legislature, no group lawmaking body. The individual in the large organization does not have the kind of constitutional rights that an individual in the society at large has. There are no protections of autonomy and free speech. Employees can be fired for many reasons. We need to constitutionalize large organizations to protect the people within them, to ensure that they can be politically outspoken."

"What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today."

"There were various kinds of direct action in the nineteen-sixties: the Civil Rights movement, in which minorities realized that nobody would do anything for them, that they had to do things for themselves; the women's movement, in which women realized they themselves had to do something about their rights; the environmental movement; and other social movements. The point is that people could not get what they wanted through the system — they had to get it directly. It is no wonder that what began as an idealistic concern for those who were deprived of their rights led to a great deal of selfishness by those who were not deprived. And here lies the affinity between the radicalism of the nineteen-sixties and the conservatism of the nineteen-eighties. Both grew from the same soil: They are different responses to the same problem."

"All of us are responding to the fact there is no system that can keep any promises. Everybody is fighting each other under the illusion that it is the "other people" that are causing the problem. We don't realize that we are all in the same boat. We are all suffering from the absence of a system that can pull us together and assure us that the results of each person's work will come back to him and enhance his life in some way. Neither Democrats nor Republicans today offer any vision of how we can overcome our present difficulties and build a more satisfying life. Both offer merely palliatives and, at best, a holding pattern. We have to look beyond the politicians to see a different future."

"There is a point at which material things offer less than do some nonmaterial things. We ought to be able to live on a reasonable level and at the same time have others live on a reasonable level. Then we would not be afraid to work in our cities, we would not be at war with ourselves, which is characteristic of people in this country. If we were at peace with ourselves, we would be able to see other less material, but still quite rewarding, horizons. In The Greening of America, I did not mean that we would all become richer in material things, I meant that we would all become richer in the totality. I still think it is possible for that vision to become a reality."

"It gave people a great leap of hope, made people feel good. This was a world that could get better, a whole lot better. I might say to those who stuck with it in some way or other they will still swear by the values of the '60s."

"The question was what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine? That was the way people thought in the '60s. Now maybe that's passé today but that's the kind of thing people thought about. Are we turning into machines? They wanted to rebel against that. Their rebellion cannot be called a success by any means, far from it. Those of us who tried are very grateful that we tried to the degree we did. Anybody who achieved any success against the machine feels good about it."

"I see self-destruction now on a grand scale. That is, the unwillingness to pay for the things society needs. That's the most basic kind of self-destruction. That we're not prepared to pay for schools, we're not prepared to pay for highways. That is self-destruction. What are we doing to ourselves? It is nuts."

"What is lacking today is that people are not in any way experimenting with a different way to live, a different way to feel, a different way to be. The things that troubled young people in the '60s and the things that trouble young people today seem quite different, in the sense that the troubles today are mostly material trouble — I can't get a job; I can't support a family; whereas the complaints in the 1960s were more spiritual — I don't feel like a real person, or something like that. However, they are related. Whether you're complaining about spiritual emptiness or material emptiness, you're ultimately complaining about the same system that's creating both kinds of emptiness. That's the link between The Greening of America of 40 years ago and the way young people are feeling today."

"The book combines history, sociology, political science and prophecy. The first two-thirds of the book features a critique of modern American society and its consumerism and conformity. In that, it was far from unique. But Reich also wrote about three categories of consciousness. Consciousness I was the traditional self-reliant outlook of early America. It was replaced by the New Deal conformism of organizational society, Consciousness II. … It was Consciousness III, the counterculture of '60s youth, that attracted the most controversy. Reviews were mixed but mostly negative. For some reviewers, when it came to Consciousness III, Reich was politically naive and excessively romantic. He celebrated the hippie lifestyle and the use of psychedelic drugs. Marijuana "is a truth serum that repels false consciousness," Reich wrote. Reich was praised for capturing the spirit of the counterculture and struck a chord with parents by making it understandable and non-threatening. The book was written "with the rigour of an intellectual and the enthusiasm of a teenager," wrote law professor Rodger Citron in a 2007 biographical essay on Reich."

"We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP [gross domestic product]."

"Until recently, ecologists were content to describe how nature “looks” (sometimes by means of fantastic terms!) and to speculate on what she might have looked like in the past or may look like in the future. Now, an equal emphasis is being placed on what nature ‘does’, and rightly so, because the changing face of nature can never be understood unless her metabolism is also studied. This change in approach brings the small organisms into perspective with the large, and encourages the use of experimental methods to supplement the analytic. It is evident that so long as a purely descriptive viewpoint is maintained, there is very little in common between such structurally diverse organisms as sperma-tophytes, vertebrates and bacteria. In real life, however, all these are intimately linked functionally in ecological systems, according to well-defined laws. Thus the only kind of general ecology is that which I call a ‘functional ecology’, and this kind is of the greatest interest to all students of the subject, regardless of present or future specialisations."

"“We are able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating to maintain a liveable environment, but we tend to take nature's services for granted because we don't pay money for most of them.”"

"“The fate of the soil system depends on society's willingness to intervene in the market place, and to forego some of the short-term benefits that accrue from 'mining' the soil so that soil quality and fertility can be maintained over the longer term.”"

"In recent years it has become impossible to talk about man's relation to nature without referring to "ecology"...such leading scientists in this area as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Eugene Odum, Paul Ehrlich and others, have become our new delphic voices...so influential has their branch of science become that our time might well be called the "Age of Ecology"."

"It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now."

"It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has."

"There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences."

"If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea."

"The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe."

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it."

"It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs."

"These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

"The fact is that it is the land that has made us all Americans, and the moral is that it is the land which must be preserved to save our Americanism. Soil erosion, forest exploitation, and wildlife destruction are more insidious anti-American activities than Communism, Fascism, or foreign propagandizing."

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a member of the natural community, a wanderer who visits but does not remain and whose travels leave only trails."

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

"Activism is Patriotism."

"Wounds on the external landscape exist in the internal landscape first. We re-create those inner wounds on the outside, on the planet. So being a vegan, practicing yoga, and taking time to exercise and do things that nourish my heart and spirit are all vital parts of my “activism.” Activists have done a great job of caring for the world around us, but we haven’t done a great job of caring for ourselves and each other. … If we’re going to ask people to open up to the pain of the earth, we ought to have systems in place that enable us to relieve each other’s pain."

"I knew that if I didn't find a way to deal with my anger and hate, they would overwhelm me and I would be swallowed up in the fear, sadness, and frustration. I knew that to hate and strike out was to be a part of the same violence I was trying to stop. And so I prayed."

"One day, through my prayers, an overwhelming amount of love started flowing into me, filling up the dark hole that threatened to consume me. I suddenly realized that what I was feeling was the love of the Earth, the love of Creation. Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation's ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that's true love."

"Angels are people who pop into our lives at a need time and then disappear without a track, having helped us through a critical point."

"True transformation occurs only when we can look at ourselves squarely and face our attachments and inner demons, free from the buzz of commercial distraction and false social realities. We have to retreat into our own cocoons and come face-to-face with who we are. We have to turn toward our own inner darkness. For only by abandoning its attachments and facing the darkness does the caterpillar's body begin to spread out and its light, beautiful wings begin to form."

"I think what I really learned in all of this, was to be true to myself, to be true to my inner voice. And I began to see, that we really do have the power, our own lives really do make a difference, just by being more conscious of the food that we eat. We can heal ourselves, we can heal the environment, we can heal this planet."

"I was born in the heart of the Great American Food Machine. From childhood on it was expected that I would someday take over and run what has become the world's largest ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins. Year after year I was groomed and prepared for the task, given an opportunity to live the Great American Dream… There is a sweeter and deeper American dream than the one I turned down. It is the dream of a success in which all beings share because it is founded on a reverence for life. A dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem."

"We live in a crazy time, when people who make food choices that are healthy and compassionate are often considered weird, while people are considered normal whose eating habits promote disease and are dependent on enormous suffering."

"We don’t realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don’t hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don’t see the toxic poisons accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come. But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget… All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth. Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful—what’s best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend."

"Only a few of us had been able to face directly the obscene conditions we inflicted on animals in our farm factories and modern slaughter houses; but most of us knew on some level that they entailed a suffering that was too much to “stomach.” We can appreciate now what it did to us to eat animals kept long in pain and terror. Because the mass methods employed to raise and kill animals for our tables were relatively new, we did not fully realize the deprivation and torture they entailed. Only a few of us guessed that the glandular responses of the cattle and pigs and chickens pumped adrenalin into their bodies and that we ate with their flesh the rage of the chickens, the terror of the pigs and cattle… Acting now with more respect for other beings, we find we have more respect for ourselves."

"Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair."

"Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from Maine to Alabama to California, from ghettos, suburbs and schools, young Americans are coming to Canada to resist the draft."

"There is no draft in Canada. The last time they tried it was World War Two, when tens of thousands of Canadians refused to register. Faded "Oppose Conscription" signs can still be seen along the Toronto waterfront. The mayor of Montreal was jailed for urging Canadians to resist – and was re-elected from jail. No one expects a draft again. It's a different country, Canada."

"We have not tried to sell you on Canada – our chapter on climate is chilling – but the truth is that Canada is a nice place to be. There is little discrimination by Canadians against draft resisters, and there is a surprising amount of sympathy. Most Americans lead the same lives in Canada they would have led in the U.S. Americans who immigrate are not just rejecting one society; they are adopting another. Is it really freer? Most draft resisters – and most Canadians – think so."

"It can not be overstressed that draft resisters will probably never be able to return to the U.S. without risking arrest. This applies even to family emergencies. When a draft resister's father died last summer, two FBI agents showed up at the funeral."

"The toughest problem a draft resister faces is not how to immigrate but whether he really wants to. And only you can answer that. For yourself. That's what Nuremberg was all about."

"FBI agents have told some parents that their sons can be returned. This is not true. Rumours have been circulated by U.S. authorities because there is no other way the government can keep young Americans from coming. One recent AP wire had it that 71 "fugitive warrants" had been issued for young Americans in Canada. The story implied that the warrants were valid in Canada. They were not; they cannot be. ... Public officials, amateur draft counsellors, lawyers who do not specialize in draft work, and, unfortunately, the "underground" press are notorious sources of misinformation. Read this handbook again and again, and contact a Canadian anti-draft programme if need be."

"Not long after Miles and Eric hitch to St. Louis, Graham turns to me and says, "Let's hitch to Chicago!" "Right now?" I ask, peering up from my American government text. "Why not?" says Graham. "You've got to learn to do things when you want to; otherwise you'll be just like one of the plastic people, the dead people." So by one A.M. we are on the road. ..."

"Scott wants us each to talk about "the kind of society we'd like to live in." ... From the start I am very nervous. Phil goes on about "the redistribution of wealth"; nearly everyone comes out for "socialism" of one kind or another; Brick even hints at "another revolution." When it is my time to speak I am moved to say, "I think people's tolerance is the main issue, even more than socialism. I mean, look at the people who are for the war. Look at the courthouse square." I am afraid to go on and say what I don't like about socialism. ..."

"How long, Lord, O how long will it be before I can f--k someone like the girl sitting at the SDS literature table?"

"The subject," I say, suddenly unable to hold myself back any more, "is the SDS leadership's alienation from its followers. Not just here! Not just you!" Suddenly, horribly, I begin to sob. You could have heard a pin drop as people waited for me to continue. "I didn't want to be an SDS leader! And I don't think I've been a good one. But there's some things I'm proud of – ." Finally I manage to turn and look at Jean. "Why are you all so intolerant? Why are you all so vindictive? Why is it getting so that you only listen to people if they can quote from Father Karl or ... or Father Leon? ... Why are we giving up on trying to develop an analysis of our own? And for ourselves not just for others? Why? Why?"

"I turn out the kitchen light and sit down at the kitchen table, my head buried in my arms. I try to tell myself that I feel sick from having had to write all those lies on my application. I'd commit suicide if I really saw myself as Keith's "assistant"! But I know that isn't the half of it. ... If I do "choose to finish my B.A." I'll end up like Keith. But if I don't "choose" school I'll end up in Canada! And if I don't "choose" either – wouldn't I end up in Vietnam?"

"After dinner my father asks me into his study. ... Then he slams the door so hard that I nearly jump out of the chair. He tells me that he's been ashamed to invite anyone over since I "came back" because of my "long" hair and my clothes. ... "That's all right," I say after a tense silence. "I'm leaving for New York tomorrow. And I'm leaving for Canada, as soon as I get my immigrant status!" His expression breaks first. He urges me to "reconsider." I am afraid to say anything at all. He says, "Ever since you left home your life has been a series of blunders, and this is your biggest; your most fatal. ... You tried to destroy society and you couldn't. Really, you were trying to destroy me. Now you're going to destroy yourself instead.""

"The politics we need in North America today will not and cannot come from liberalism or Marxism, or even from just muddling through. The situation we're in is so new – so unprecedented – that we need a whole new way of looking at the world. A whole new way of seeing things and thinking about things (especially political things)."

"A new way of seeing and a new politics is arising already in bits and pieces, here and there, across the continent. ... The new politics is arising out of the work and ideas of many of the people in many of the social movements of the 1970's: the spiritual, environmental, feminist, and "men's liberation" movements; the human potential, simple living, appropriate-technology, and business-for-learning-and-pleasure movements; the humanistic-transformational education movement and the new nonviolent-action movement. … Each of these movements ... has something to add to the new politics. Their contributions come together like the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle."

"More and more of us have, over the last 10 years or so, become deeply involved in one or more of the movements mentioned above. At the same time, though, the radical political movements of the 1969's seem to have collapsed. Could there be a connection? I believe that the radical political movements declined as soon as they began to promote a doctrine of us-against-them, of "we have all the answers", of separation rather than healing. As soon as they began to promote a dogmatic Marxism that overstressed our need for things and tried to make us feel guilty about our deeper needs, which are emotional, psychological and spiritual (and which are what got us into the radical political movements in the first place)."

"At the root of our troubles is a cultural complex whose six main elements make up a "Six-Sided Prison" that traps us all. In Part I[,] I try to name and describe the six sides of the Prison: patriarchal attitudes, egocentricity, scientific single vision, the bureaucratic mentality, nationalism, and the big-city outlook. Capitalism and socialism are, I argue, both rooted in the Prison (which predates capitalism by hundreds of years) – though neither needs to be. (Racism, militarism, exploitation, ecocide, etc., are also rooted in the Prison.)"

"In Part II I argue that the Prison is institutionalized by the "monolithic mode of production" which creates effective monopolies not for its brands but for its products ... institutionalized medicine; the universal, compulsory school; compulsory heterosexuality; ... In Part III ... I propose a class analysis that sees us not as ruling-class, bourgeois or proletarian, but as life-, thing- or death-oriented. In Part IV ... I suggest that the new worldview implies four "primary" New Age ethics – the self-development, ecology, self reliance-cooperation and nonviolence ethics. ... In Part V I try to suggest what "New Age society" might be like. ... It would foster "localization" – community and regional decentralization (to whatever extent the various communities wished). And it would foster "planetization" – planetary cooperation and sharing. ... In Pat VII ... I argue for a strategy that would involve ... (a) healing self, and (b) healing society."

"You can't say that New Age politics is "left wing" or "right wing". It is perfectly compatible with public or private ownership of the means of production, and it speaks equally much to rich and poor, young and old, white collar and blue."

"There are two defining political choices that every society must make ... and neither of them is covered by the old political categories "left" and "right". The first choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to encourage us to seek rich individual experience and to be of service to others – or do we want our society to encourage us to seek material riches in the form of possessions and status? ... The second choice has to do with this. Do we want our society to extend state and institutional control over our lives (for whatever reason) – or do we want our society to encourage us to be self-reliant and self-determining?"

"By [refusing] to work for a traditional revolution we would not be "giving up the struggle". As we saw in the previous three chapters, we would be struggling – nonviolently – against the Prison [of consciousness] and its institutions, which are more responsible for the sterility of our lives (and our society) than "human nature" or "capitalism". But even if we can't do any more than embark on the stage of self-healing, even if we can't get a strong group together, or if all our group efforts fail to heal society, we would still be learning to preserve our worth as human beings. And that is an essential part of the political process today. For without life-oriented people ... there can be no New Age evolution. And only New Age evolution can take us off of the production-consumption continuum and out of the Prison."

"The First American Experiment began in the mid-1700s, and by its own criteria, at least, has been a smashing "success":"

"The participants in the Second American Experiment have differing views of the First Experiment. Some ... think it was a noble and brilliant experiment that is no longer sustainable. Others ... think it was ignoble and wrong-headed from the start. ... But the larger point – and the point that concerns us in this book – is that all participants in the Second Experiment are convinced that the First Experiment is no longer wise. Here are some of the questions they've been asking:"

"Because of the consensus on full employment, certain observations rarely break in to the public political dialogue. These include: ... that even if full employment were possible, it might not be desirable in the new kind of society we are entering; and that even today, most of the useful work we do is not structured into paying "jobs.""

"There is an emerging alternative to the big government-big business-big labor kind of "rebuilding" of America. Its basic strategy is to get investment capital out of the hands of the big banks ... and into the hands of the communities. Its greatest champions are neither politicians nor oppositional political groups, but – remarkably – bankers; or, more specifically, those few bankers who describe themselves as "community development bankers.""

"Typically, "progressives" and change agents have demanded more money for social programs. But today it's clear that the way we do things needs to change – and that if things were done more appropriately, more humanely, more intelligently, we might end up spending less on social programs than we do now. Take education ... . Over the last 10 years or so, a handful of education reformers have ... come up with exciting new ideas for changing the ways our schools are administered, the ways our children are taught, and the kinds of things they're taught. And nearly all their ideas would cost no more than our current practices cost. Some would actually save us money!"

"Thoughtful conservatives are not unattracted to holistic providers' emphasis on self-care and personal responsibility. Thoughtful liberals and socialists are not unattracted to holistic providers' emphasis on environmental factors in disease. But neither left nor right has ever acknowledged that the holistic health movement carries within it the seeds of a whole new approach to a national health care program for this country, with its own coherent ideas about finance, delivery, research and education."

"The U.S. could seek to acquire the moral authority to act as a healing presence in the world. Our role could be to adjudicate disputes, support "all-win" solutions to international problems, and make our resources available to people, groups and governments that were willing to help themselves. ... We could seek to play a catalytic, rather than a dominant, role in the Third World. We could pay more attention to what the poor themselves want. We could concentrate less on funding massive projects, and more on building up the capacity of indigenous institutions to do for themselves. We could pay more attention to the context in which our aid is given. This may be a highly unconventional approach to foreign aid. But it could also be highly popular. It combines the traditional left's emphasis on equity and the traditional right's emphasis on self-help."

"This article was written for those who believe that the spectrum of opinion is more like a circle than a straight line. It was written for those who believe that each of the different perspectives on terrorism has something to add to the whole. In this view, coming up with a solution to terrorism is not a matter of adopting "correct" political beliefs. It is, rather, a matter of learning to listen – really, listen – to everyone in the circle of humankind. And to take their insights into account. For everyone has a true and unique perspective on the whole. Fifteen years ago the burning question was, How radical are you? Hopefully someday soon the question will be, How much can you synthesize? How much do you dare to take in?"

"Slowly at first, and now in growing numbers, from kitchen tables to nonprofit organizations to corporate boards, Americans are turning away from the politics of bickering and division and working on a new politics – a politics of creative problem solving. It would have us take the best from the political left and right, and come up with something new that serves us all. It would have us come up with solutions to public issues that are thoughtful enough, clever enough, and inclusive enough, to bring people and factions together."

"Politics is stuck in America today. We need to break through the stale debates and self-serving non-solutions that are coming from both political parties, and we need to do it without ending up at the "mushy middle," where there's no direction or principle. That's where the radical middle comes in. The radical middle is an attempt to break out of that stuckness in a fresh and principled way. It consists of everyone who's bold and yet savvy enough to want idealism without illusions – a fresh and hopeful vision that doesn't fall into the trap, as many leftists do, of looking back to chestnuts from the counter-culture of the Sixties and Seventies. ..."

"The radical middle movement is phenomenally diverse. But if you look at what everyone who might be called radical middle is saying and doing, you'll discover we share four goals. I like to call them our Four Key Values:"

"Put these values together and you can see how the radical middle draws holistically on our entire political tradition. Each value is a sort of updated version of an aspect of our 18th-century political heritage – liberty, equality, happiness, and fraternity, respectively."

"The caring person is the carrier of radical middle politics. ... To see this clearly, it helps to look at three competing archetypes of the Good American. ... Self-aggrandizers are ambitious strivers. They get their primary identity from their occupation and the social status associated with that. ... Self-sacrificing individuals are not personally ambitious – and when they are they try to hide it. They get their primary identity from their ethnic, racial, or religious affiliation or sexual orientation. ... Caring persons may or may not be personally ambitious, but they want their jobs to provide them with opportunities for personal growth and social relevance. They get their primary identity from the lifestyle choices they make and the values they consciously choose. They are equally committed to personal freedom and social justice, self-development and social change."

"If Thomas Jefferson is the liberals' (and libertarians') Founding Father, and George Washington is the conservatives', and Tom Paine is the radicals', then Benjamin Franklin is the radical middle's. He was extremely practical. ... At the same time, he was extraordinarily creative. ... He was a man of principle. ... Yet synthesis and healing were an art with him. He became our most ardent champion of religious tolerance. And better than anyone at the Constitutional Convention, he was able to get the warring factions and wounded egos to transcend their differences and come up with a Constitution for the ages."

"If done right, biotechnology can enhance the entire world's well-being. And that's why the radical middle is drawn to it. One of our key value commitments is maximizing human potential. ... Although the biotech debate may seem hopelessly polarized, a third voice – nuanced, hopeful, adult – has begun to be heard. Call it the voice of cautious optimism. Call it the voice of the radical middle."

"We need mandatory national service so we will all take part in performing the collective tasks we know are ours. We need mandatory national service because duty and honor are as necessary to us as oxygen and water. That's what I was trying to tell the Army in my application to the JAG corps at the age of 52. And that's what the radical middle needs to tell the American people."

"For most of the 20th century, small radical groups were seen as social change incubators. The various socialist and communist parties, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a thousand local or regional variants were where it was at. ... But we live in a knowledge society now – a world that depends increasingly on professional expertise and special skills. If we want to change that world, we'll need to be even more expert and skilled than those who'd defend the status quo. That's why professional schools, not radical groups, are our social change incubators now. And radical middle social change agents know it. Many of the most idealistic and dedicated of them have been pouring into our graduate schools, including our great medical, business, and law schools."

"This new edition of New Age Politics – stripped-down and updated for the 21st century – has been launched to reassert, in thunder, that the movements of our time have generated a perspective or ideology of their own. It's as coherent an ideology as liberalism or Marxism – and far more relevant to our needs as life-loving human beings on a finite planet. In other words, New Age Politics gives us a common ground on which to stand."

"I'd do some things differently if I were writing this book from scratch today. I would be more nuanced in the history sections. I'd be less inclined to see everyone at "Self-development Stages Six and Seven" as the cat's meow. Above all, perhaps, I would emphasize that some of what I call "monolithic institutions" are evolving (i.e., are being shoved by us) in a positive direction today – so I'd bend over backward to encourage immersion as well as resistance. We need transformers everywhere, inside "The System" as well as outside it. But even with such "flaws" (mainly the flaws of youth), I think New Age Politics is still the best single expression of the new politics as a coherent, systemic, integral whole."

"Lorian Press could have simply reprinted the first edition of New Age Politics, from 1976. I liked its length (only 50,000 words), it covered almost all the ground I do here, and I wanted to prove to you that the perspective I synthesized – the perspective of many people in the social change movements of today – goes back to the Nixon-Ford era, when the traditional left and right both lost their way. It was not spontaneously generated by any single social movement of the last 40 years. Rather, all our movements have been re-inventing, adding to, and deepening a perspective that already in the 1970s stood as our only real alternative to More Of The Same."

"What Keys, Laszlo, Falk, and many other New Agers are proposing … could be called a "planetary guidance system." ... A planetary guidance system would regulate the world, not run it. ... Does this chapter strike you as impossibly idealistic? In 2011, Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation argued that a decentralized planetary guidance system is currently arising outside the confines of the United Nations. To Khanna, it consists of an ever-changing (depending on the issue) array of representatives of governments, non-governmental organizations (nonprofits), corporations, super-wealthy individuals, and universities. Although Khanna, a buttoned-down radical centrist, doesn't use terms like "synergic power" and "win-win approach," it is obvious from his text that that's exactly how (some of) these entities are beginning to operate in the global context."

"Few political authors employ the term New Age anymore; however, ... many use equivalents or near-equivalents such as communitarian, evolutionary, green, holistic, integral, post-socialist, radical centrist, spiritual, transformational, and transpartisan, and that's OK. Perhaps the new generation, not being ego-attached to any of these, will finally come up with a term we can all say "Aha!" to."

"These 100 books do not agree on everything – and that's OK too. You don't need total agreement when you're an open-hearted, decentralist, experimentalist New Ager. After the Prison and its institutions lose their hold over us, you won't even want such agreement. Within the parameters of certain life-affirming values, you'll want a hundred flowers to bloom. Synergy is all; cooperation and coordination is all."

"Our country is struggling. The left and the right are tearing each other apart. Meanwhile, none of our major domestic and global issues are being properly addressed. We desperately need a new political perspective for the 21st century, one that can unite and heal this nation. And we need a political movement backing it up."

"[M]any of us are buying into an agenda that would neither unite nor heal us. It's all around us now. Forget balanced budgets. Condone illegal immigration. Defund the police. Don't go hard after street crime. Don't institutionalize the mentally ill. Dismantle the nuclear family. … None of this stuff is original to the 2020s. All of it goes back to the latter half of the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was tearing us apart. It's been dredged up again by a variety of socialists, often deeply caring people whose passion keeps them from seeing that other sorts of people hold to equally valid truths (and half-truths). It rarely occurs to them, just as it rarely occurs to other passionate activists across the political spectrum, that what the social change movement in America needs today isn't an us-against-them strategy—"we're right, they're evil"—but a strategy for healing and uniting. That's an even more radical strategy, in its way. It would have us listen empathically to everyone's deepest needs and fears … and then find ways to address everyone's core interests."

"Many of us like to call ourselves "post-socialist" radicals now. (We also use terms like "radical centrist," "creative centrist," and "transpartisan.") It's not that we're unhappy with socialists being out there. It's just that, when formulating policies, we draw from diverse other perspectives as well. To us, everyone has a piece of the truth, right populists and left populists, libertarians and Greens, Biblical Christians and Islamists, Turning Point USA and Black Lives Matter … everyone. And the more "radical" you are, the more willing you are to listen to, respect, and accommodate everyone's most vital interests (as distinct from their emotionally expressed public positions on issues)."

"What happened to all [those] groups and initiatives [that sprang up between 1970 and 2000] and the visionary, beyond-left-and-right perspective they sought to advance? Why did the [New World] Alliance and New Options disappear, and the U.S. Greens turn into just another left-wing protest party, and terms like "transformational" get taken over by Sixties-style socialists? In this tough-love [book], you will be able to discern many, many, many answers. One of my volunteer reader-critics, a nice guy from Minnesota, was astonished by all the awful behavior I describe in and around the organizations covered here. Suffice it to say that, if you are ever going to create a healing new politics, you are going to have to dwell on what went wrong with us … and then act differently from us. It may be harder than you think."

"Something that may surprise if not unhinge you about this [book] is that I tell you as much about relationships as about politics narrowly defined. Using myself as a more or less representative lens, I pay special attention to … activists' often difficult relationships with parents, our often contentious relationships with [movement] colleagues, and our often shaky relationships with lovers. Marx and Madison didn't write about that stuff. But you can hardly understand the perils of visionary, unconventional politics without paying compassionate attention to those aspects of our lives."

"Most of all, I was angry all the time. Angry for righteous political reasons, but also because I'd rejected so much of what makes a long life beautiful and bearable. Usually my anger expressed itself subtly and indirectly (re-read Parts One and Two of this book), but you've also seen it on full display, from my hysterical shrieking about [the theft of] my clothes at Freedom House in Mississippi in 1965, to my tossing Sandra's suitcase out my door in 2005. And not to cast stones, but I was often surrounded in this book by equally "dedicated," equally "selfless," equally obsessed, and equally angry activists. There is no way around it. No matter how dire the political situation may seem to us, we must take the time to become decent and whole human beings if we want to truly change things for the better. … Only by making a conscious effort to heal ourselves—be it through church services and groups, spiritual practice, individual or group therapy, community volunteer work, deep apolitical friendships, or some lovely combination of these—can we supposedly visionary and healing activists ever gain the capacity to take this nation beyond poisonous Us-against-Them type politics. Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world."

"Mark Satin ... looks and sounds just like a boy many a citizen of Wichita Falls, Tex., would love to give a good spanking to. He has long hair. ... He has a yellow button announcing DISSENT in the lapel of his rumpled jacket. Dissent is certainly what he is about, and he has had a great chance to exercise it since he joined SUPA last month as a $25-a-week counselor for draft emigrants from the United States. "That godawful sick, foul country; could anything be worse?" he asks, his frayed sleeve bumping against a loaf of sliced bread on the desk. ("My breakfast and lunch," he explains apologetically.)"

"Mark Satin has thrown himself, as much as any man can, into helping his draft-evading contemporaries. For the first time in his twenty years, he has found a cause he can believe in. Seven days a week, from nine in the morning until, often, very late at night, he runs the SUPA Anti-Draft programme. ... On my first visit, there were ten to fifteen young Americans drifting in and out of the SUPA office. Some were settled for the evening in the elderly but comfortable furniture (all donated). They were reading, napping, gassing; some writing letters, one strumming a guitar. There was a mail basket and someone to take and pass on messages; a hot plate, an assortment of instant foods. There's always someone's baggage lying around. ... All the young Americans seem to respond to Mark Satin. His enthusiasm for the job and general air of unflappability seem catching."

""Are you here to help?" soft-spoken Mark Satin asked the trio of young girls sitting on the worn sofa with the apple strudel in their laps. The girls nodded happily and Satin, 21, went off to find a knife to cut the cake. He returned with a metal bookend, sliced off a few chunks, and soon the Toronto anti-draft office was filled with a gentle munching. Most people – and there were plenty in the office yesterday – were Americans. "I'm not against the draft," Satin said, leaning on a desk where he's typing a form letter telling Americans how to avoid it. "Defensive armies are all right, but not the way it is right now." ... Two workers were telephoning people willing to house newly-arrived draft evaders. ... Two youngsters in the outer office were talking seriously about ... substitute teaching. ... "I have a feeling we'll be open rather late tonight," Satin Said."

"In a major bid to encourage Americans to evade military conscription, the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme plans to put into the mail next week about 5,000 copies of a "Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada." The 132-page soft-cover book contains detailed advice about how to qualify as a Canadian immigrant, and information about Canadian jobs and school opportunities, housing, politics, culture and climate. The book is one of the manifestations of the growing organizational apparatus and financial strength of the Anti-Draft Programme, which deliberately uses the British spelling of "program." Other such signs, as reported by Mark I. Satin, the 21-year-old director of the "Programme," are: ... A list of 200 Torontonians who have offered to shelter and feed draft dodgers. ... Establishment of an employment service to help the youths find jobs. ... Mr. Satin's office gives cash grants to draft resisters who are without funds."

"His [Satin's] most important contribution to draft resistance was editing the TADP Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada which he compiled from his own well-researched knowledge of Canadian immigration and from material submitted by a number of Canadian and American contributors. The ninety-page book contained every conceivable piece of information that a young American could possibly need to know about moving to Canada, including the demolition of a number of myths. All of it was presented in a strikingly thorough and concise format. It is excellently written. .... If a resister had any doubts about going to Canada before he read the book, he seldom had any after finishing it. ... By mid-1968 the TADP manual had become the first entirely Canadian-published best seller in the United States."

"The young men who came to Canada rather than take part in the Vietnam war always impressed me with their singleness of purpose. ... Probably a more honest statement about the complexity of the feelings that caused them to reject their homeland in the turbulent days of the sixties is expressed in Mark Satin's Confessions of a Young Exile. ... Satin's emigration wasn't dictated totally by his idealism. More often than not, he talked himself into radical positions and situations as a result of trying to impress his peers or his girl friend, or rebelling against middle-class parental authority."

"Some surprisingly ordered thinking has been going on in the counter-culture. The evidence at hand is a book called New Age Politics. ... In 60,000 words Satin has made a comprehensive critique of North American society and outlined a Utopian society to replace it. There's no comfort in Satin's analysis for anyone who believes that our present way of life is worth preserving. ... Society would be transformed by a bloodless – but thorough – evolution. For instance, the nuclear family (mom, pop and the kids) would have to go. ... Bigness in government, in business and in all human organizations would have to go too.... Utopian defence policy is what one might expect from a pacifist draft dodger. … It's a question of how one views man's nature. Are we born naturally good but corrupted by civilization? Or are we born with a devil as well as an angel inside us?"

"Mark Satin is one of the few profound political thinkers of our day who has grasped the significance of both spiritual practice and psycho-spiritual growth. ... The author's active political background, and more recent involvement in self-growth, make him uniquely qualified to draw together ideas which up until now have remained isolated from one another. ... Satin sees North Americans to be in a unique and unprecedented situation. Rather than relying upon ready-made economic or political systems (Marxism, socialism, capitalism, etc.), we could evolve an entirely new way of perceiving and thinking about political reality. New Age Politics is an attempt to delineate this emerging perceptual and conceptual framework. While reading Satin's book, I was reminded of Yaqui Indian Don Juan's teaching that one must learn (or re-learn) to "see.""

"The do-it-yourself spirit also moved Mark Satin – a young American draft resister living in Canada – to write, design, and even typeset his own book, New Age Politics: The Emerging New Alternative to Marxism and Liberalism. The book sold 10,000 copies, which Satin mailed from his basement before he sold reprint rights to a mainstream publisher – to secure, he explained apologetically, more money and wider distribution for his work."

"The themes of New Age politics were first articulated in the late 1970s by Mark Satin, who had fled the Vietnam War draft for Canada. There it dawned on him that "the ideas and energies from the various 'fringe' movements – feminist, ecological, spiritual, human potential and the like – were beginning to come together in a new way." Drawing on decentralist and feminist theories of the early 1970s, Satin's New Age Politics called for an escape from the "six-sided prison": patriarchism , egocentricity, scientism, bureaucracy, nationalism and urbanism. In its place Satin advocated a "third force" which would transcend the traditional divisions between Marxism and capitalism, liberalism and conservatism, Democrats and Republicans. Still seeking that synthesis, Satin publishes the Washington-based newsletter "New Options," which has criticized both the Sandinistas and Reagan's policy in Central America while searching for a "different" ground from pro-life and pro-choice forces on the abortion issue."

"Both Mark Satin and Jerry Rubin speak of legitimate mystical experiences where good and evil dissipate into the One. [Marilyn] Ferguson claims that good and evil are transcended by an awareness that "unites opposites." ... But what is left of ethics? The New Age is morally unfit to lead us politically. It lacks any absolute standards that would tell us that the outcome of the great transformation would be more good than evil."

"In New Age Politics Mark Satin articulates some of the ethics and values that would likely form the platform of a new society in harmony with diverse spiritual beliefs. He sites four "New Age ethics" as (1) the self-development ethic ...; (2) the ecology ethic ...; (3) the self-reliance / cooperation ethic ...; and (4) the nonviolence ethic."

"As represented by Mark Satin's (1978) movement-encompassing treatise, New Age Politics, the New Age movement is plural in its expressions of antagonism towards relations of subordination in the United States. It calls for a new revolutionary strategy appropriate for our time, and focuses its efforts on the discursive plane, at the level of consciousness. Its goal is a radical plural democracy, although it lacks specific criteria for the ideal world or ideal political work. And it rejects, explicitly, the working class as the primary agent of change, emphasizing instead plural struggles from diverse standpoints. This chapter argues that the New Age does not represent an adequate political response to the conditions of late capitalism. ... Satin is calling for therapeutic, self-oriented work within the democratic imaginary, a reworking of individual consciousness in place of public struggle. ... Satin does not call his enemy capitalism."

"The most ambitious effort to fashion a new-age manifesto was Mark Satin's comprehensive but quite readable New Age Politics. ... More historically grounded than the bulk of new-age literature, Satin's book found transformative significance in the feminist and ecology struggles of the period, which, however, he tried mightily to fit into the new paradigmatic shift; these movements were important [to Satin] precisely insofar as they transcended "politics" and could be integrated into a spiritual outlook. Satin conceded that efforts by movements and parties to win reforms might be useful here and there, but they could never be the heart of the matter. ... Satin was convinced that, in the end, the desired aim of a new harmonious world comprised of people fully in touch with nature and their inner selves would have to be realized outside of and against a hopelessly corrupt and dehumanizing institutional system."

"After Satin accepted amnesty in 1978, he was invited to speak at a gathering in the States. He had just returned, and he was awake all night before the talk with excitement and fear. ... The speech got a standing ovation, and Satin wept. His vision of what was possible, of what in fact was already moving through the culture, had evidently struck a nerve. ... Two decades later, we know that Satin's hopes for a new political platform did not materialize. But over those long years in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver Island, he caught sight of and began to plan for the general movement for change that is taking form now."

"A lot has changed in the forty years since I stood before Mark's table at the World Symposium on Humanity and purchased his ugly but powerful little book. Mark and I have changed. Undoubtedly, if he were to write this book now, it would be different. But it stands as the first comprehensive articulation of a transformational political ideology. It shows, in great and systemic detail, how we can depthfully understand our world of crisis and get to a world of collaboration and wholeness. And, by the way, it restores the true meaning of "New Age" – from a prophetic image all too often used to justify narcissism, to an image of the innate potential in all of us to make things new for the benefit of all."

"From the United States there seemed to be not one but many different kinds of movements developing ... as well as a number of ideologies that already then seemed to be in competition with one another: the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, the new-age politics of Mark Satin, the appropriate technology of Amory Lovins, the ecofeminism of Carolyn Merchant, to name some of those that I became acquainted with."

"New political parties such as the Citizens Party have formed in the United States. ... The more visionary, global movement coalescing around the prodigious communications efforts of Mark Satin, author of New Age Politics (Delta, 1979), has now incorporated as the New World Alliance."

"The New World Alliance (NWA) is a conscious attempt to create a national political movement based on values that have traditionally stood outside politics. NWA is the brainchild of Mark Satin. ... When Satin returned to the United States under Carter's Vietnam amnesty program, he decided to take a cross-country bus trip to assess the mood of "new age" activists, to learn from them what was needed to start a new national political organization. "I went systematically to 24 cities and regions from coast to coast, ..." he wrote to us in a letter. "I stopped when I found 500 people who said they'd answer a questionnaire ... on what a New Age-oriented political organization should be like – what its politics should be, what its projects should be, and how its first directors should be chosen." ... In December 1979, the NWA held its first governing council meeting in New York."

"The thirty-nine members of the NWA Governing Council included teachers, futurists, environmentalists, feminists, think-tank members, an others from a variety of professional backgrounds. ... The NWA sponsored a number of conferences and facilitated local and national networking. In 1981 the group put forward a "Transformational Platform," which was the first attempt to take ecological, decentralist, globalist, and human-growth ideas and translate them into a detailed, practical political platform with about 300 specific proposals. ... Yet something was missing. Satin observed: ... "We are engaged in theoretical-verbal overkill in exactly the same way the military people are engaged in stockpiling weapons and for the same kind of reasons. ... We don't know what to do.""

"The purpose of the Alliance was to "articulate new decentralist / planetary politics, launch practical and realisable projects and to serve as one of the organisational vehicles for transformation." ... Its political vision included healing, rediscovery, human growth, ecology, participation, appropriate scale, globalism, technological creativity and spirituality. ... Mark Satin ... eventually settled down to producing an interesting monthly newsletter called New Options, which in March 1988 reported a circulation of over 10,000."

"The New World Alliance ... was a short-lived precursor of the North American Greens. It was founded by Mark Satin (author of New Age Politics) after a nationwide Delphi-type survey among 500 academics, policy experts, and political activists interested in this emerging political paradigm. These new colleagues ... were also exploring the relationship between personal and political transformation."

"The Greens in the United States ... began as an initiative of individuals formed by the co-author of a "new age" interpretation of the West German movement, Charlene Spretnak, along with David Haenke from the North American Bioregional Congress, Mark Satin, editor of New Options and author of New Age Politics, and Harry Boyte."

"Spretnak and Satin played a significant role in facilitating the articulation of Green political thought, and the philosophies they represented have left their influence on the Greens' ideological foundation. ... Although Spretnak's and Satin's books developed their sources in different ways, both authors drew upon radical and cultural feminist critiques of women's oppression. ... The sixty-two founding Greens may have chosen the term community-based economics over anticapitalism because cultural feminism and New Age thought are both antileftist. Both Spretnak and Satin rejected leftist critiques, preferring instead the West German Greens slogan that had graced the cover of Spretnak and Capra's book Green Politics: "We are neither Left nor Right, we are in front.""

"West German Green Wilhelm Knabe and a few U.S. Greens ... were becoming impatient with the movement's slow pace of growth. Mark Satin, one of the "New Age" and more conservative participants, suggested that Greens needed to leave behind some classic characteristics of the sixties counterculture: namely, their fear of money, hierarchy, authority, and leadership. Satin felt the Greens would need both fundraising skills and a more coherent structure in order to get their message out to a broad base of the population."

"Christa Slaton ... worked with and studied the Greens in the United States. She was concerned that Greens carried "mistrust into most of their political interactions with each other ... name calling and insults are routinely exchanged." As political commentator Mark Satin noted, the irony was that the Greens made a point of saying how important it was to treat people well, yet he found that they sometimes treated each other worse than people in traditional political parties."

"New Options suggests that the New Age / New Left has to continue to evolve into the "New Center" – or fail, for real this time, to change the world."

"New Options is spearheading a movement that is still nameless. He [Satin] no longer uses the "New Age" moniker, as it now conjures up Shirley MacLaine and Windham Hill. Though he's active in the U.S. Green movement, ... he's reluctant to identify his newsletter as a Green publication. "The U.S. Green movement so far is characterized by an ineptness of organizing strategy and a substantial degree of cultural alienation from the American mainstream," he says. ... But Satin isn't reaching for the brick pile. He says he's content with New Options pragmatic stance. "I think it's a third path which alienated people can move to once they become bored with their own alienation.""

"Mark Satin, in his Washington newsletter Radical Middle, describes the domination of the public debate about the [biotechnology] issue by two different groups. ... Satin's report carries the encouraging news of an emerging group with a different voice, one that is "nuanced, hopeful, adult" and that he calls the "voice of cautious optimism." It is essentially a willingness to listen to both sides of the argument."

"The term "radical middle" debuted on the national stage in 1995 in a Newsweek cover story by Joe Klein. ... Almost a decade later, the electorate is more polarized than ever. ... Not so, according to New Age activist-cum-sensible centrist, Mark Satin, whose new book Radical Middle announces the arrival of a kinder, gentler radical middle, Think of it as a "compassionate conservatism" for the center-left. ... Satin wants his book to be the movement's manifesto. Like the political newsletter he's been issuing since 1999, .. Satin's rhetoric employs New Age emotionalism in the service of mostly hard-nosed, rational solutions to a broad spectrum of social and political problems. True to claim, the policy proposals cataloged here don't fit neatly into the standard left / right model. ... The most provocative ideas combine a leftist concern for the commonwealth with a conservative instinct for individual responsibility and self-reliance."

"Distinctions between the two parties are of little interest to Satin. Having spent his entire political life outside conventional politics, Satin firmly believes that the current system can't lead to the moderate majority he wants. The most "radical" thing about Mark Satin's Radical Middle is the extraordinary depth of the author's belief that identifying solutions to America's problems depends on spurning conventional party politics."

"Even though Satin continually inveighs against the "impractical idealism" that (by his own admission) much of his own career exemplifies, his book ultimately places him in the sturdy tradition of "idealistic" American reformers who think smart and principled people unencumbered by political constraints can change everything. For all the stylistic differences, Radical Middle echoes the message of Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, which placed unlimited cash at the disposal of the proposition that a (nominally) uncorrupted and nonpartisan candidate could simply "open up the hood" of American government and fix things."

"Mark Satin's irritating Radical Middle is a timely clue to what gave liberalism a bad name. It opens breathlessly. ... Satin ... perceive[s] obvious solutions to almost everything. The greater part of the book consists of short chapters that state daunting problems and then summarily solve them. ... Why do so many liberal preachments grate like glass shards on a blackboard? Well, maybe it's the haut à bas tone, the disdain of politics, the smug armchair analyses, the insufferable smart-aleckness."

"In his new book, Radical Middle ..., which provided the initial inspiration for this article, Satin fleshes out pragmatic new policy ideas. ... Satin draws inspiration from nonpolitical realms of society where people are blending what works from various orthodoxies. He points to developments like integrative medicine, ... socially responsible business, ... and judges' increasing use of psychology, economics, and even literature in crafting legal opinions. "Politics," he says ruefully, "is the last area of society where this kind of creative thinking is taking hold.""

"The most important departure from politics-as-usual that Satin ascribes to the radical middle is a commitment to finding a higher common ground that integrates best insights from both the left and the right. ... There is no way to do justice here to Satin's outpouring of specific policy proposals. No one will agree with all of them. But there is a good deal of fresh thinking here, and some of the policy ideas Satin presents may turn out to be very important. The most troubling aspect of Radical Middle is Satin's tendency to exaggerate how far along this approach to politics really is. ... Satin's tendency to set out his own favorite policy ideas as if they are the official position of the radical middle, for which he is serving as spokesman, is problematic. It risks turning the radical middle into a new ideology with a detailed political platform."

"Satin grew up in a small town in Minnesota and felt an instinctive sort of rebellion, but unlike Bob Dylan, he did not play the guitar and so had no way of expressing it."

"That folks like Mark Satin now package their wares in the soft pastels of personalist psychology rather than the primary colors (among them, red) of Herbert Marcuse helps keep the national blood pressure down, but in truth it's simply another example of the Ralph Lauren-ization of American politics."

"Were the '80s as bad as some people think? At least one social interpreter, Mark Satin ..., says no. ... Satin maintains that a new cultural archetype emerged during the '80s, "the caring individual," or one who is equally committed to self-development and social change, to individual freedom and social justice. A true grassroots democracy, he argues, requires these personally and socially responsible individuals. ... Just as he rejects the "media caricature" of the '80s, he rejects some of the romanticization of the 1960s. An antiwar activist who fled to Canada to organize similarly disaffected Americans, Satin ... recalls the era as divisive and judgmental, with too much emphasis on us-vs.-them. "I hope what we're moving toward is an integration of individualism and community with acceptance of the diversity in our society," he says."

"It has been said that the difference between successful people and most others is that successful people "fail" more often. In other words, experiments always yield information. Mark's life – a series of experiments – shows that it's important for all of us to rediscover the importance of commitment and experiment. Mark is beginning to view his life trajectory with a little more compassion. He likes to say he's living evidence of "what you can do with determination and no fancy credentials or resources." And yet he did have one priceless resource: the courage of his conviction. In certain esoteric systems, the Fool is considered the most advanced level of spiritual attainment. The Fool, in this light, is trusting enough to throw himself headlong into life. The Fool makes mistakes – and thereby makes discoveries. This is a book of such discoveries."

"Satin ... helped create the first edition of the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants which was published under his name. ... Fetherling observed that Satin was highly publicity conscious and reports once having heard him say, "Anonymity would kill me." Perhaps Satin's interests ran in the family, for his mother was interviewed about her son in the Ladies' Home Journal and his father started a publishing house. ... A reporter who interviewed Satin ... described him as "unremarkable looking. Not tall, not terribly tidy, with brown hair and eyes and a bit of length to his nose. A bit of length to his hair, too, though not enough to startle.""

"Mark and I became "conference buddies." He and I were both on the road a lot in those days, each of us offering our particular message, and we would meet up at one conference or another. I was always glad to see Mark. I saw him then – and still see him now – as one of the true "carriers of spirit" who have dedicated their lives to bringing a fiery vision to life in order to better humanity. If anyone can claim to be a spiritual teacher, Mark can, for he teaches us how to claim and express the human spirit of freedom, potential, and wholeness."

"Schumacher ... rightly saw that in the world today Buddhism is a more potent basis for resisting the economism that rules the West and through it most of the East."

"Jesus said that we could not serve both God and wealth, and it is obvious that Western society is organized in the service of wealth."

"Whereas traditional Christianity calls for the subordination of all other commitments to the commitment to God, Buddhism teaches us to give up all craving and attachment, just those aspects of the human psyche that ground economism."

"Economism is the view that the economy is the most important part of society and that the other dimensions such as politics and education should serve it. Economism has become the ruling ideology, not because of claims of economists, but because of the decisions of political leaders, financiers, corporate leaders, and the general public."

"There’s a creation, a creating force. But whatever it is is in everything we see. It’s in that log, in that stone. It’s just the power. And I’ve had many experiences with it. Certain circumstances bring it out, which all the mystics know. That is part of our Zen training too. It’s called an "opening." … For a second, you see what the world is. It is a whole other way of seeing, which is horrible, terrifying, and extraordinary and a great blessing to have."

"Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came."

"The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) — how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called “unspeakable” and “indiscribable,” the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with “the occult” and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . .”; Melville referred to “that profound silence, that only voice of God”; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found “more divine than yourself.” And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread."

"The ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron. … The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One."

"In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky."

"Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place that is filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing what we seek."

"I have often tried to isolate that quality of "Zen" which attracted me so powerfully to its literature and later to the practice of zazen. But since the essence of Zen might well be what one teacher called "the moment-by-moment awakening of mind," there is little that may sensibly be said about it without succumbing to that breathless, mystery-ridden prose that drives so many sincere aspirants in the other direction. In zazen, one may hope to penetrate the ringing stillness of universal mind, and this "intimation of immortality," as Wordsworth called it, also shines forth from the brief, cryptic Zen texts, which refer obliquely to that absolute reality beyond the grasp of our linear vocabulary, yet right here in this moment, in this ink and paper, in the sound of this hand turning the page."

"A Mahayana teaching with a strong Taoist infusion, Ch'an or Zen cast off the dead weight of priestly ritual and mindless chanting of the sutras or scriptures — the records of the Buddha's teachings — and returned to the simple zazen way of Shakyamuni. In a statement attributed to the First Chinese Patriarch, Bodhidharma, an old monk from India who is loosely associated with the birth of Zen, the new teaching was described as "a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded upon words or letters. By pointing directly to man's own mind, it lets him see into his own true nature and thus attain Buddhahood.""

"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego."

"I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process — not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower."

"Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. … For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline. Isn’t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse."

"I rarely go back to a book, since I never feel sufficiently caught up in my own work. However, a few years ago, on a stalled expedition, I had an opportunity to reread The Idiot, which I’ve always thought of as “my favorite novel” (if such a thing can be; the great ones are no more comparable than the sun and the sky). I wanted to see if that book held up — if it was as heartbreaking and magnificent as I once thought it, and of course it was. Whereas — well, let’s simply say that most modern novels, even the better ones, are pretty dinky in ambition and certainly unworthy of a second reading when one knows that great ones are still out there unread. … I admire many of my contemporaries, especially those who risk something or bring some new element to their work. … Of course, there are single novels that are excellent, but what interests me most is the working through from book to book of some recurrent obsession or at least preoccupation, a reverberation from within, which may burst the work wide at any moment, though it often seems half-hidden from the writer. What I’m trying to describe, I guess, is conflagration, a life burning up, as lives do in Dostoyevsky. Obsession that isn’t crazed or criminal is always enthralling."

"Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work."

"Peter Matthiessen’s writing — fiction and nonfiction — does not provide approximations. What it does do with inimitable skill is put a reader at the live heart of life — a powerful, rich sense of immediacy, of being in that moment. … He is a man of tough-minded opinion, deeply earned and forthrightly rendered, with passion and quick humor ringed with what one writer calls a "useful melancholy." … There is, to my mind, no writing life more vital and of greater distinction in the second half of our century. Matthiessen’s prodigious and varied works led William Styron to call him "an original and powerful artist . . . who has produced as distinguished a body of work as any writer of our time . . . He has immeasurably enlarged our consciousness.""

""Warbler Woods" (For Peter Matthiessen) Never too proud to tip his head back./To gaze, look beyond.../He knew the names of every warbler,/stitched inside his skin,/the seven eagles, graceful cranes, he followed them/to tucked-away forests and creeks, could see/a slightest flicker of movement,/a nesting memory, how the world was once,/would never be again./He could stand under skies for hours,/never weary of their habits, never tire."

"Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye. They are basic to the development of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from the series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense."

"Longer than memory we have known that each animal has its power and place, each a skill, virtue, wisdom, innocence — a special access to the structure and flow of the world. Each surpasses ourselves in some way. Together, sacred, they help hold the cosmos together, making it a joy and beauty to behold, but above all a challenge to understand as story, drama, and sacred play."

"To produce 1 lb. of feedlot beef requires 7 lbs. of feed grain, which takes 7,000 lbs. of water to grow. Pass up one hamburger, and you'll save as much water as you save by taking 40 showers with a low-flow nozzle. Yet in the U.S., 70% of all the wheat, corn and other grain produced goes to feeding herds of livestock. Around the world, as more water is diverted to raising pigs and chickens instead of producing crops for direct consumption, millions of wells are going dry. … In the U.S., livestock now produce 130 times as much waste as people do. Just one hog farm in Utah, for example, produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles. These megafarms are proliferating, and in populous areas their waste is tainting drinking water. In more pristine regions, from Indonesia to the Amazon, tropical rain forest is being burned down to make room for more and more cattle. … We, at least, have the flexibility—the omnivorous stomach and creative brain—to adapt. We can do it by moving down the food chain: eating foods that use less water and land, and that pollute far less, than cows and pigs do. In the long run, we can lose our memory of eating animals, and we will discover the intrinsic satisfactions of a diverse plant-based diet, as millions of people already have."

"Man is innately a creature of love. That love is the most powerful force in the universe, and eventually — it's a very slow process — it will conquer. I think there will come a time, and this is down the road a great many years, when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it: the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say “meat-eaters!” in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism."

"The basic message of Gunsmoke was that there's going to be the bad and there's going to be the good. And most of the time, the good will win out. That's an old theme. There are no new themes, it's just the way you do them. It's the way you bring fresh characters to that theme."

"I have looked attentively at chickens raised in this battery] fashion, and to me they seem to be unhappy and in poor health. Their combs are dull and lifeless except for glaring and unnatural patches of color that appear occasionally … The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the time they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds chasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, actually, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse. The eyes of these chickens through the bars gleam like those of maniacs. Let your hand get within reach and it receives a dozen vicious peeks—not the love peck or the tentative peek of idle curiosity bestowed by the normal chicken, but a peck that means business, a peck for flesh and blood, for which in their madness they are thirsting."

"If you eat chicken, maybe you're on one level. If you wear a mink coat, maybe you're on another level. But if you wear cosmetics, cosmetics that are tested on animals, then you're just unconscious. Really, my message is simple. It's a message of compassion. In this world that is spinning madly out of control, we have to realize that we're all related. We have to try to live harmoniously."

"It's been at least 20 years. I used to eat burgers and steak, and I would just be knocked out afterward; I had to give it up. The first thing was dairy. I was about 24 years old and I had tons of acne and mucus. I met some random girl on a bus who told me to quit dairy and all those symptoms would go away three days later. By God she was right."

"Because superior non-animal methods are used for this exact training by military and civilian programs around the world, animals are clearly not required to meet your objectives. … I'm sure you agree that our military personnel deserve state-of-the-art training and that our country deserves to be respected for its civilized treatment of animals."

"Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real. Our artificial environment is there and we can experience it, yet it has been created on purpose by other humans. It is an interpretation of reality; it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process. We are left with no frame of reference untouched by human interpretation."

"Television is an experience that can be had by virtually everyone at the same time. By substituting for a greater diversity of experiences and unifying everyone with it, it aids commercial efficiency. With all people confined to the same mental and physical condition, a single advertising or political voice appropriate to the common mood can influence everyone."

"Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: Itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power."

"Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven's sake, don't come here to live."

"When people talk about reincarnation, I always feel that if there is such a thing, this is definitely my first time, because I'm always amazed. I'm both amazed at how horrifically we can treat each other and all other living things, and also amazed at the wonder and the beauty. I'm like: 'Oh my God, look at that bird!' or 'Look at that flower!' literally every single day. I can't get over how people are putting so much energy and so many resources into going to Mars when everything we could ever dream of is on this planet, if we just take care of it. What do they have on Mars? They don't even have oxygen up there!"

"[At age 11] I noticed this truck full of calves and bonded with one in particular, who kept kissing me. After about an hour the truck driver came out of the restaurant. I asked him what the calf's name was, and he said, "Veal, tomorrow morning by 7 o'clock." That was it: I could no longer disassociate the creature from what was on my plate."

"Human civilization as we know it will end, sometime in the 21st century."

"Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously."

"The showing was succesful. ...[T]he project went on to produce ...52 television programs and 3 volumes of textbooks, plus teacher's manuals, study guides... [etc.]... designed for... college level courses... [plus] complete... videos and print materials for... high schools. The program... cost nearly $10 million."

"Physics is not a newcomer to televised education. The first televised physics lecture dates... to the 1930s. A remarkable number of today's American research physicists—particularly... from rural and poorer sections of the country—trace their interest... to the... in the 1960s. The Mechanical Universe follows in that tradition..."

"Intellectually, technically and philosophically, physics and television are two separate cultures with almost no bridges between... [I]t is... time consuming and arduous... to span the gap... [T]here is no one... [at] Caltech... capable of reading, much less writing, a television script competently. ...[T]here is no one on the production side who knows enough... physics... to plan an important sequence, much less write a script or produce a program. This situation is a symptom of the malady of science illiteracy that ' is intended to help cure...""

"Let me be more explicit about the differences between a conventional telecourse and The Mechanical Universe. In the conventional course, the production company begins by convening a panel of hired academic consultants. ...Courses ...are basically education by committee, with the crucial job of teaching mainly in the hands of scriptwriters and producers. But... college education is to give... the benefit of learning from people who have spent a lifetime mastering their subjects and... adding new knowledge... The crucial part is organizing a subject and seeing the connections... precisely what telecourses entrust to scriptwriters. ...The Mechanical Universe ...arises out of a real physics course at a real—and excellent—university. It represents a single, unified vision of what physics is about, and how it's connected to its roots in mathematics, history and society. ...[N]ew techniques for had to be invented."

"The Mechanical Universe project had its roots in a routine revision of Caltech's introductory physics courses... assigned to Goldstein and begun in 1979... the first major changes... since... taught by Richard Feynman in the early 1960s."

"[T]he full series of 52 programs was first broadcast during the academic year 1986-1987..."

"The raw material for... both the television programs and the textbooks... was a set of verbatim transcripts of the lectures delivered by Goldstein in the revised Caltech physics course. ...[T]he material would be would be presented at two levels, at least in the textbooks if not in the television programs. The upper level... for physics and engineering majors... [t]he other textbook, which corresponds to the level of the television programs... for a more general audience. Nevertheless, it... include[d] differential and integral calculus... presented as they had arisen historically... as part of... mechanics. Mastering... simple... s and s would make physics easier to understand than... the pseudocalculus... in many college physics courses. ...Liberal Arts students had little difficulty learning calculus. ...[T]his was a "major pedagogic triumph" ...A primer, written by Apostol ...was added to the ...arsenal of aids ..."

"[T]he primary audience was to be the "nontraditional student," especially "distance learners,"... [I]t was hoped that with a resourceful, dedicated local teacher... the teaching of introductory physics at any level could be enriched... [A]lso... that a large, casual, nonstudent audience would watch... for pleasure and instruction. ...[T]hat ideal target audience was the high-school physics teacher."

"[T]he earlier Feynman course had sought to makes physics exciting by relating... to contemporary... problems. The new course took the opposite tack... to recreate the historical excitement of the original discovery. ...[[Classical mechanics|[C]lassical mechanics]] ...is treated as the discovery of "our place in the universe." ...[I]ts climax is Newton's solution of the . ...[[w:Living history|[H]istorical recreations]] ...became a staple of the project."

"[A] program is devoted to Millikan's oil-drop experiment, partly as an application of Newton's second law, and... to induce... philosophical ideas about how science is... done. ...The solution ...create a ..."Millikan Museum" ...in the Norman Bridge Laboratory where he had worked. The set involved thousands of artifacts, many ...Millikan's own ...After ...shooting ...the museum was disassembled, to live on only on videotape."

"The problem of how to present detailed mathematical derivations is confronted... in the animated scenes. ...The comprimise solution... invented while designing the pilot program, is called the "algebraic ballet." ...done in detail, but rapidly and entertainingly. The viewer was not expected to absorb every detail... [b]ut every step was displayed... [A]ttention is never lost during these [rapid] mathematical passages."

"The lack of qualified high-school physics teachers in the United States is a notorious (and self-perpetuating) problem. ...[C]ombating that problem was... one of the central goals of the TMU project. ...The idea was to induce teachers to study the college-level version so ...they could use the high-school materials ...with poise and confidence."

"The high-school editions... video modules, averaging 15 minutes... are accompanied by extensive written materials for the teacher, including suggestions, background material, demonstrations, and sample questions... [T]eachers are willing to work very hard to improve their skills... given reasonable support, and... even teachers who are well qualified... find new inspiration in... TMU."

"When I was vice chair of the faculty, the chair... was Robbie Vogt... As soon as he stepped down... and I became chair of the faculty, he became chair of the PMA division, and he called me into his office... in 1979. We had been teaching from the Feynman physics books... using them as textbooks ever since Feynman had given the lectures, from '62 to '64. ...[T]hey had just gotten too hard. It was great for the teachers; I loved teaching from his books. But for the students—if you didn’t already know physics, trying to learn physics from those books... Seeing physics with fresh eyes all over again, it’s wonderful—that’s why every scientist in the world owns a set of these books... [b]ut to learn it for the first time from those books is just impossible. You basically need to know physics, in order to appreciate them."

"Robbie... asked me to create the new physics course—at least the first year of the new physics course. And I said, “Robbie, when you were chair of the faculty, you asked for complete teaching relief. Now I’m going to be chair... and you’re giving me the hardest teaching job in the whole institution. Don’t you think that’s a little unfair?" We... cut a deal... full financial support for a postdoc so I could hire somebody to help me on my research group while I was doing all this."

"I taught Physics 1... [b]ut not from the Feynman books ...We used some conventional textbook ...but I sort of redesigned the course. ...By the time I started teaching it the second time, I started to get worried, because... I would go on teaching the same course forever... [or] I would leave it and somebody else would teach it and it would become a completely different course... One way of preserving memory is to write a textbook, but I had already written States of Matter...been there, done that. I didn’t want to do that. And then it occurred to me that television was bound to play some role in the future of education. ...What I vaguely had in mind was that the lecture could be taped by a television camera at the back of the room."

"So I went to Murph... and he said, "I’ll give you a little money to look into it." ...I think $50,000—and I hired... Don Delson... head of AV... to be my assistant... We learned all kinds of things..."

"I... remember one morning at... breakfast, reading the '... story that had given $10 million a year for fifteen years to make telecommunications materials for higher education. ...[H]e created ...the Annenberg CPB Foundation ...to give out Annenberg’s money. ...I ...got in touch with Sally Beaty and ...KCET ...and we wrote a proposal. ...KCET ...was on the verge of going belly-up. And they tried to load the entire overhead of the station on our project. ...[W]e got the award—with KCET not involved. ...[N]ow we had no flagship station, but we had the money ..."

"[I]t was no longer a television camera at the back of the room. It was now a production, with programs, and all the production values... [I]t... evolved into something far beyond anything I had imagined."

"Sally told me... it cost about $75,000 to make a half-hour program. ...[T]he original grant was for $750,000. We eventually got $6 million... [P]art of the proposal... was to make a pilot program that cost hundreds of thousands... and took three years... And that was a make-or-break—either they accepted the pilot program or the project was dead. ...It became the second program in the series... "The Law of Falling Bodies." ...this absolutely beautiful pilot program ...which cost $350,000 ...everybody loved it and they said, “Go ahead.” ...And that meant ...classy computer animation and ...actors ...We did all kinds of things you just don’t do in educational television."

"[N]obody ever made a million dollars on . Five years after the series went public, we got a letter ...saying, "You’ve crossed the threshold. You now share in the revenues." ...But by then, there were no more revenues. ...I didn’t care ...That wasn’t the purpose ...Later on, we applied to the for an additional $3 million to turn out a high school version ...without calculus."

"There are 25,000 high schools in the United States... and the number of qualified high school physics teachers... in the range of 2,000 to 4,000. So most high schools do not have anybody qualified... and physics is taught in most high schools. ...Many of the so-called crossover teachers, who were teaching physics but weren’t trained ...were teachers. Home economics had fallen out of favor."

"When two sympatric, closely related species appear to have very similar needs, we may ask whether mechanisms exist that enable them to avoid direct competition. Implicit in this questions the presumption that two species with identical requirements cannot coexist (Gause 1934)."

"The bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) is a creature of superlatives. Growing to 1500 pounds (700 kilos), traveling on transoceanic migrations, and reputedly capable of swimming 50 miles (90 km) per hour, it is one of the largest, most wide-ranging, and fastest of animals. To anyone who has seen this saber-finned giant explode through the surface of the sea, it is among the most magnificent."

"Bottom trawls—large bag-shaped nets towed over the sea floor—account for more of the world's catch of fish, shrimp, squid, and other marine animals than any other fishing method. But trawling also disturbs the sea floor more than any other human activity, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world's fish population."

"Most of the oxygen we breathe is made by ocean plankton. And when animals left the seas in which life arose, they took seawater with them, in their bodies — an internal environment crucial for cellular survival. We are, in a sense, soft vessels of seawater."

"A couple of years ago I was participating as a writing coach in a "sea-mester," sailing 1,000 miles from Hawaii to , while students from Stanford University received lectures and closely supervised instruction and conducted independent projects on high-tech oceanography. These were smart kids, and the professors were superb. Five hundred miles from land, we got into a discussion on whether the ocean is a "wilderness." The consensus: Obviously it is; there was no sign of humanity, not another boat in sight. Everyone savored the thought: wilderness! But, I reminded everyone, we haven't caught a single or seen a or a . Wilderness? I don't think so. If the were covered with water, you wouldn't see that the buffalo were gone, either. There is no ocean wilderness. The whole ocean feels our effects, through fishing, pollution, dying s, , immortal plastics, oxygen-asphyxiated s, , and ."

"From the happy-go-lucky days of oil exploration and drilling, when a lot of easy sources were being found and easily managed, we're gotten ourselves into this sort of apocalyptic time. We're willing to destroy almost everything, risk almost anything, and go ahead with techniques for which we have no way of responding to the known problems. And that is truly an addiction in the real sense of the word, an addiction by which people destroy their own bodies to continue to have a supply of something that is killing them."

"... I haven’t wanted to write the same book over and over again, so I’ve gone back to what was really my earliest interest, which is what other animals do and why do they do it. My upcoming book, “Alfie and Me,” is also much more about the human relationship with the rest of life on Earth, why it’s the way it is for us now, and how it was in other cultures, in other times. And it’s really about what kind of relationship with the world we can have when we blur the usual boundary between us and other species. The narrative story is wrapped around a little baby that was near death that somebody found on their lawn and was brought to us, and whom we raised. She decided to stay around our property and to get a wild mate, and to raise young in a that I put up on the outside wall of my studio."

"The general biological ignorance bodes ill for democratic decisions on environmental issues."

"The classification of biodiversity is the job of taxonomists who, born as packrats and inspired by a compulsion to explore and collect the world's biological riches, will risk life and limb to solve the great puzzles of biogeography, ethnobotany, and evolution."

"Current evidence suggests that teosinte was first tended for its green ears and sugary pith by hunter-gatherers as an occasional rainy-season food in small “garden” populations away from its homeland, and not for its abundant grain-containing, hard fruitcases, which easily mass-collected but useless as food, are as yet unknown from the archeological record. A rare grain-liberating teosinte mutation (probably expressed in only one “founder” plant, a mazoid “Eve”), which exposed the encased grain for easy harvest, was soon recognized as useful, collected and planted (or self-planted). Thus maize was started on its way to a unique horticultural domestication that is not comparable to that of the temperate Old World mass-selected agricultural grains."

"As a plant explorer, Iltis led expeditions to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador. His expertise focused on the corn and caper families, but he collected broadly. For example, he discovered two of the 13 species in the tomato genus, including one that proved to have a trait sought in the canning industry."

"There’s no more pungent symbol of the corrupt nature of the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq than , the -based oil services conglomerate, which has made billions from the war even in the face of charges of massive , shoddy work, official bribery and political influence-peddling. The remarkable thing is that Halliburton’s looting of Iraq and the happened in broad daylight, right under the nose of the press, the Democrats and Michael Moore, who made Dick Cheney’s former company the bete noir of his film “9/11.” Nothing deterred the company from capitalizing on the war it helped orchestrate."

"In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is."

"After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because none of the in the village were firing back. There was silence because the Viet Cong had never fired on US troops that day. There was silence because there were no Viet Cong in the village that day. There was silence because most of the people who were in the village that day were dead."

"The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything: chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves."

"President José Mujica of Uruguay, a 78-year-old former Marxist guerrilla who spent 14 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, recently visited the United States to meet with President Obama and speak at a variety of venues. He told Obama that Americans should smoke less and learn more languages. He lectured a roomful of businessmen at the US Chamber of Commerce about the benefits of redistributing wealth and raising workers' salaries. He told students at American University that there are no “just wars.” Whatever the audience, he spoke extemporaneously and with such brutal honesty that it was hard not to love the guy...Mujica’s influence goes far beyond that of the leader of a tiny country of only 3 million people. In a world hungry for alternatives, the innovations that he and his colleagues are championing have put Uruguay on the map as one of the world’s most exciting experiments in creative, progressive governance."

"A very angry Senator John McCain denounced CODEPINK activists as "low-life scum" for holding up signs reading "Arrest Kissinger for War Crimes" and dangling handcuffs next to Henry Kissinger's head during a Senate hearing on January 29. McCain called the demonstration "disgraceful, outrageous and despicable," accused the protesters of "physically intimidating" Kissinger and apologized profusely to his friend for this "deeply troubling incident." But if Senator McCain was really concerned about physical intimidation, perhaps he should have conjured up the memory of the gentle Chilean singer/songwriter Victor Jara. After Kissinger facilitated the September 11, 1973 coup against Salvador Allende that brought the ruthless Augusto Pinochet to power, Victor Jara and 5,000 others were rounded up in Chile’s National Stadium. Jara’s hands were smashed and his nails torn off; the sadistic guards then ordered him to play his guitar. Jara was later found dumped on the street, his dead body riddled with gunshot wounds and signs of torture... Rather than calling peaceful protesters "despicable", perhaps Senator McCain should have used that term to describe Kissinger’s role in the brutal 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which took place just hours after Kissinger and President Ford visited Indonesia. They had given the Indonesian strongman the US green light—and the weapons—for an invasion that led to a 25-year occupation in which over 100,000 soldiers and civilians were killed or starved to death. The UN's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR) stated that U.S. "political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation" of East Timor."

"You might think that McCain, who suffered tremendously in Vietnam, might be more sensitive to Kissinger’s role in prolonging that war. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger, along with President Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — killing perhaps one million during this period. He gave the order for the secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger is on tape saying, "[Nixon] wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn't want to hear anything about it. It's an order, to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves." Senator McCain could have...[read] the meticulously researched book by the late writer Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Writing as a prosecutor before an international court of law, Hitchens skewers Kissinger for ordering or sanctioning the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of “unfriendly” politicians and the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers, journalists and clerics who got in his way. He holds Kissinger responsible for war crimes... from the deliberate mass killings of civilian populations in Indochina, to collusion in mass murder and assassination in Bangladesh, the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile, and the incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor. McCain could have also perused the warrant issued by French Judge Roger Le Loire to have Kissinger appear before his court. When the French served Kissinger with summons in 2001 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger fled the country. More indictments followed from Spain, Argentina, Uruguay — even a civil suit in Washington DC."

"In recent budget negotiations, Senate Democrats agreed to a boost in military spending that exceeded the cap for fiscal 2018 by $70 billion, bringing the total request to an enormous $716 billion... more Pentagon contracts will be awarded to private corporations that use endless war to line their pockets... If neither major political party will stand up to this status quo, what can be done? One answer might be found in the recent push to divest from fossil fuel companies undertaken by, among others, Norway and New York City. By December of 2016, 688 institutions, representing over $5 trillion in assets, had divested from fossil fuels... Author Naomi Klein described the fossil fuel divestment effort as “a process of delegitimizing” the sector and of affirming that it yields “odious profits.” An analogous campaign to delegitimize beneficiaries of war is long overdue."

"In addition to pressuring our members of Congress to refuse campaign donations from weapons manufacturers and war profiteers, we must mount a divestment effort at the institutional and municipal level. Investment in war must come at the cost of public disgrace... Divestment offers an alternate means of addressing the blight of war profiteering in an era in which traditional political routes have been closed by our craven representatives. It also brings the message into smaller communities–communities that crumble while defense contractors live in luxury...A new coalition of about 70 groups... has formed to launch a Divest From the War Machine campaign"

"March 19 marks 15 years since the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the American people have no idea of the enormity of the calamity the invasion unleashed. The U.S. military has refused to keep a tally of Iraqi deaths. General Tommy Franks, the man in charge of the initial invasion, bluntly told reporters, “We don’t do body counts.” One survey found that most Americans thought Iraqi deaths were in the tens of thousands. But our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion. The number of Iraqi casualties is not just a historical dispute, because the killing is still going on today. Since several major cities in Iraq and Syria fell to Islamic State in 2014, the U.S. has led the heaviest bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam, dropping 105,000 bombs and missiles and reducing most of Mosul and other contested Iraqi and Syrian cities to rubble."

"Right now, is a very difficult time, and there are many people who would be our counterparts in Iran who are in prison. But as you say, the U.S. has put forward a very misguided view of Iran. First of all, they always say it’s the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world. And when we hear that, we should just say, “Stop, no, not true.” And then, in terms of internally in Iran, there are more avenues for women, for example, to study, to work. We are connected with a group of women business people that have enormous businesses. They have their own, very large factories, their own farms, their own–I’m friends with a woman who is an architect of some of the largest dams in the country. So that’s sort of something that you don’t hear about, that women are so actively involved in the economy. There is a myth that the Jewish population is such a repressed population. Being a member of the Jewish community and an American, when I first went to Iran I was very concerned about being both. And as soon as you said that to people, there went, “Oh, first of all, we love America.” And it is a very pro-American population. And then, they love Jews. And it’s funny, whether it’s among these religious Iranians, they’re saying, “Oh, we have so much in common between our religions,”..."

"The Pentagon budget is out of control. It’s been out of control since after World War II. And then especially since after 9/11 and the war on terrorism has been an excuse to keep building up and building up and building up the Pentagon budget. Even Trump himself said the other day that the Pentagon budget was out of control. But then he goes and he asked for more money for the Pentagon. So...if you add in things like the veterans’ issues and the Energy Department that deals with nuclear weapons, over a trillion dollars that we spend every year on militarism. And that’s where we have to address how we can pull money out of the Pentagon, not affect our safety and security; in fact, make us safer, because we will [not] be antagonizing so many other countries with endless wars."

"Let’s take one issue alone, and that’s U.S. military bases overseas, for example. There are over 800 U.S. military bases. The vast majority of them are serving no national security purpose. They’re relics of World War II. Why do we need dozens of military bases in Germany, in Italy? We have them in Korea now, where there’s peace talks in Korea, and yet we still have dozens of military bases. In fact, over 80 of them."

"As our nation debates the merits of President Donald Trump's call for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan, absent from the debate is the more pernicious aspect of U.S. military involvement overseas: its air wars. Trump's announcement and General James Mattis' resignation should unleash a national discussion about U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts, but no evaluation can be meaningful without a clear understanding of the violence that U.S air wars have unleashed on the rest of the world for the past 17 years...In this "war on terror," the U.S. and its allies have dropped a staggering 291,880 bombs and missiles on other countries...let's keep in mind that these strikes represent lives snuffed out, people maimed for life, families torn apart, homes and infrastructure demolished, taxpayer money squandered, and resentment that only engenders more violence."

"As former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz told NPR a week after 9/11: "It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done... We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others..." And yet here we are, 17 years later...bombing ever more "nations, organizations, (and) persons" who had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes committed on September 11."

"Trump: Withdrawing from #Syria, good. Withdrawing from #Afghanistan, good. Staying in Iraq? No! Bring the troops home."

"So #Boeing must be raising their champagne glasses to toast their man, Pat Shanahan, as interim Sec. of Defense. 3 decades w Boeing, now @DepSecDef is Boeing’s biggest customer. A coup for Boeing, a loss for taxpayers and democracy and peace. #divestfromwar"

"FoxNews hates the #SyriaWithdrawal. So does #MSNBC and #CNN. So both parties, cable networks and weapons makers all agree. No wonder our wars never end."

"The biggest blunder of this century was the invasion of Iraq... It’s very unfortunate that there are still members of the Democratic Party that voted for the Iraq War that are poised to be in very important positions in government right now. We have Steny Hoyer, the majority leader, was in favor of the Iraq War... Eliot Engel, who is going to be the Foreign Affairs Committee chair, who was not only in favor of the Iraq War, but he was one of the few Democrats against the Iran nuclear deal. He’s in favor of moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem in Israel. You have people like Adam Smith, who is going to be the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, took over $250,000 from the weapons industry and only shifted his position on Saudi Arabia, for example, because he was challenged from the left. So, we have Democrats in high positions who have been pro-war. Many of them vote every year for this incredibly inflated Pentagon budget. And they have to be challenged. And they are being challenged by some of the very wonderful Democrats we have, like Ro Khanna, who has been a tremendous champion to try to stop the war in Yemen. And we have the wonderful incoming members of Congress who have to have the same energy and determination that they have around a New Green Deal to say we need a new peace deal."

"While we can't guarantee that candidates will stick to their campaign promises, we still must ask this vital question: What prospects for peace might each of them bring to the White House? Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Act in the wake of the Vietnam War, it has finally used [[w:War_Powers_Resolution#Yemen,_2018–2019|it for the first time], to try to end the U.S.-Saudi war on the people of Yemen]] and to recover its constitutional authority over questions of war and peace. This hasn’t stopped the war... but its passage in Congress, and the debate it has spawned, could be an important first step on a tortuous path to a less militarized U.S. foreign policy in Yemen and beyond."

"So what hope is there that one of the parade of Democrats seeking the presidency in 2020 could be a real "peace candidate"? Could one of them bring an end to these wars and prevent new ones? Walk back the brewing Cold War and arms race with Russia and China? Downsize the U.S. military and its all-consuming budget? Promote diplomacy and a commitment to international law? Ever since the Bush/Cheney administration launched the present-day "Long Wars," new presidents from both parties have dangled superficial appeals to peace during their election campaigns. But neither Obama nor Trump has seriously tried to end our "endless" wars or rein in our runaway military spending...While we can't guarantee that candidates will stick to their campaign promises, it is important to look at this new crop of presidential candidates and examine their views—and, when possible, voting records—on issues of war and peace. What prospects for peace might each of them bring to the White House?"

"In 1989, at the end of the Cold War, former Pentagon officials Robert McNamara and Larry Korb told the Senate Budget Committee that the U.S. military budget could safely be cut by 50% over the next 10 years. That obviously never happened, and our military spending under Bush II, Obama and Trump has outstripped the peak spending of the Cold War arms race. In 2010, Barney Frank and three colleagues from both parties convened a Sustainable Defense Task Force that recommended a 25% cut in military spending. The Green Party has endorsed a 50% cut in today’s military budget. That sounds radical, but, because inflation-adjusted spending is now higher than in 1989, that would still leave us with a larger military budget than MacNamara and Korb called for in 1989."

"We are very concerned about what’s happening now. The U.S. has taken so many measures just in the last year or two to move towards a war with Iran, starting with pulling out of the nuclear deal, designating the Iran Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, trying to get the Iranian oil exports down to zero, creating chaos in the Iranian economy. And of course, Iran is going to prepare itself for what looks like an attack. And this also can be put on John Bolton, who has been calling for an attack on Iran since before he ever got into the administration... It is I think important to understand that these policies are being organized by John Bolton. John Bolton, who is so close to the MEK in the case of Iran. John Bolton who has said before that he wants to bomb Iran. John Bolton that is so close to the Saudis and to Israel. And of course Donald Trump himself having an even closer relationship to the Saudis and to Israel has made the situation in Iran extremely dangerous. The only thing that is going to counter this is if we get Congress to stand up to pass legislation that says, “We will not allow any unauthorized attack on either Iran or Venezuela,” if we get all of the presidential candidates to stand up and say no to an attack on Iran and if we get the American people to be very loud and clear saying, “We are totally opposed to any attack on Iran.”"

"At least 70 countries have signed on to the March 23 call by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for a worldwide ceasefire during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like non-essential business and spectator sports, war is a luxury that the Secretary General says we must manage without for a while. After U.S. leaders have told Americans for years that war is a necessary evil or even a solution to many of our problems, Mr. Guterres is reminding us that war is really the most nonessential evil and an indulgence that the world cannot afford – especially during a pandemic."

"The UN Secretary General and the European Union have also both called for a suspension of the economic warfare that the US wages against other countries through unilateral coercive sanctions. Countries under unilateral US sanctions include Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe. In his update on April 3rd, Guterres showed that he was taking his ceasefire call seriously, insisting on actual ceasefires, not just feel-good declarations. "…There is a huge distance between declarations and deeds," Guterres said. His original plea to "put armed conflict on lockdown" explicitly called on warring parties everywhere to "silence the guns, stop the artillery, end the airstrikes," not just to say that they would like to, or that they’ll consider it if their enemies do it first."

"As we chant “Black Lives Matter”, let's include the lives of people of color dying from US sanctions in Venezuela, being blown up by US bombs in Yemen and Afghanistan, and being tear-gassed, beaten and shot in Palestine with US weapons."

"Webinar today: From North Korea to Venezuela to Iran, US sanctions disproportionately impact women....Tune in today at 11 am ET"

"Fidel Castro said that instead of investing so much in the development of increasingly sophisticated weapons, those with the resources should promote medical research and put science at the service of humanity, creating instruments of health and life, not death. #cubanobel"

"At the Tulsa rally, Trump says Biden is a helpless puppet of the radical left. Would be funny, but Trump’s people believe it. Ridiculous."

"Did you know that of the nearly 1200 health professional Cubans involved in fighting COVID-19 around the world, more than half are women? Join the campaign to award them the Nobel Prize. https://cubanobel.org #CubaNobel"

"Fantastic article by Cuba’s Ambassador to Canada, @JosefinaVidalF, about the 2 pandemics facing Cuba: COVID and the US embargo. #CubaNobel"

"We need a movement to #DefundTheMilitary. Why spend so much $ for a dept that can’t pass an audit, can’t win a war, and brings so much death and misery to black and brown people around the world?"

"US wars wouldn’t be possible without a racist worldview. "If you want to bomb or invade a country filled with black or brown people, you have to first suggest they’re backward people in need of saving or savage people in need of killing.” @mehdirhasan"

"Cuban doctors arrive in Martinique to fight coronavirus. "The only thing that motivates us is to save lives, that's the most important thing in the eyes of a Cuban doctor.” That’s why they could get the Nobel Prize. (27 June 2020)"

"Curious that allegations re Russia giving Taliban $ to kill US soldiers comes just in time to sabotage talks re the last nuclear treaty between the US and Russia, the withdrawal of more US troops from Afghanistan and peace in Syria. Sounds like fake news to me..."

"Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars."

"So Israel bombs Iran’s Natanz nuclear complex and the world just yawns. What if Iran bombed Israel’s nuclear facilities, which, by the way, really DO have nuclear weapons??? Israel is trying to push the US into a war with Iran, and we can’t let that happen!"

"Though it will supposedly stave off Israeli annexation of the West Bank and encourage tourism and trade between both countries, in reality, it is nothing more than a scheme to give an Arab stamp of approval to Israel’s status quo of land theft, home demolitions, arbitrary extrajudicial killings, apartheid laws, and other abuses of Palestinian rights. The deal should be seen in the context of over three years of Trump administration policies that have tightened Israel’s grip on the Palestinians: moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, and creating a so-called peace plan with no Palestinian participation or input. While no U.S. administration has successfully brokered a resolution to Israel’s now 53-year-long occupation, the Trump years have been especially detrimental to the Palestinian cause. Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi wrote on Twitter that with this deal, “Israel got rewarded for not declaring openly what it’s been doing to Palestine illegally & persistently since the beginning of the occupation.”"

"Among the most brutal aspects of this period for Palestinians have been the loss of support for their cause in neighboring Arab states. The Arab political party in Israel, Balad, said that by signing this pact, “the UAE has officially joined Israel against Palestine, and placed itself in the camp of the enemies of the Palestinian people.” The UAE’s change from supporting Palestinian dignity and freedom to supporting Israel’s never-ending occupation is a calculated move by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, a shrewd Middle East dictator who uses his country’s military and financial resources to thwart moves towards democracy and respect for human rights under the guise of fighting Islamic terrorism."

"Flournoy... represents the epitome of what is worst about the Washington blob, the military-industrial complex’s revolving door. Her whole history has been one of going in and out of the Pentagon, first under President Clinton, then under President Obama, where she supported every war that the U.S. engaged in, and supported increases in the military budget, and then used her contacts in government in these kind of hawkish think tanks that she either joined or helped create. She sits on the board of a corporation that works with defense contractors. She herself has made a lot of money by parlaying these insider contacts into positioning companies to be able to get these very plush Pentagon contracts. She also sees China as an enemy that has to be confronted with higher-tech weapons, which justifies increased Pentagon spending and puts us on a dangerous path of an increased cold war with China. So, these are just some of the reasons we think she would be a disastrous pick as secretary of defense."

"...the U.S. Congress is poised to pass a $778 billion military budget bill for 2022. As they have been doing year after year, our elected officials are preparing to hand the lion's share — more than 65% — of federal discretionary spending to the U.S. war machine, even as they wring their hands over spending a mere quarter of that amount on the Build Back Better Act. The U.S. military's incredible record of systematic failure... after 20 years of death, destruction and lies in Afghanistan — cries out for a top-to-bottom review of its dominant role in U.S. foreign policy and a radical reassessment of its proper place in Congress' budget priorities. Instead, year after year, members of Congress hand over the largest share of our nation's resources to this corrupt institution, with minimal scrutiny and no apparent fear of accountability when it comes to their own reelection."

"If the public is ever to have any impact on this dysfunctional and deadly money-go-round, we must learn to see through the fog of propaganda that masks self-serving corruption behind red, white and blue bunting, and allows the military brass to cynically exploit the public's natural respect for brave young men and women who are ready to risk their lives to defend our country. In the Crimean War, the Russians called British troops "lions led by donkeys." That is an accurate description of today's U.S. military."

"Maintaining a war machine that outspends the 12 or 13 next largest militaries in the world combined actually makes us less safe, as each new administration inherits the delusion that the United States' overwhelmingly destructive military power can, and therefore should, be used to confront any perceived challenge to U.S. interests anywhere in the world — even when there is clearly no military solution and when many of the underlying problems were caused by past misapplications of U.S. military power in the first place."

"President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 elections is held hostage by two corporate Democratic senators: fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the Democrats’ $350-billion annual domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016. Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, six more than Donald Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, health care, clean energy or fighting poverty."

"As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon — and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy. While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in health care and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s."

"The tragedy is that the U.S. leaving Afghanistan, for the Biden administration, is a chance to focus on what they call our main adversary, which is China. It justifies this continual, gargantuan Pentagon budget that eats up so much of our resources. And it is a delusional idea that we should be focusing on China as an enemy — it’s a country of over a billion people, it’s a nuclear country — especially at a time when we need to work with China to deal with issues like the climate, like the pandemic, like global poverty. China is going into Afghanistan and will work with the new Afghan government to build up the infrastructure. Well, where is all that infrastructure that the U.S. didn’t do for the last 20 years? Why have they left Afghanistan, having been occupied by one of the richest countries in the world — us, the United States — to be one of the most impoverished countries in the world? The U.S. should actually learn from China that instead of going into countries with bombs and bullets, it should go into countries to figure out how to help build the infrastructure and build the economy, that would be a win-win situation."

"We feel that the U.S. owes a tremendous responsibility, not only for getting the Afghans out, as we’re trying to do now, but for the millions of Afghans who are left behind in terrible, dire situations from this 20 years of war. You had a great program on yesterday, Amy, about the humanitarian crisis. Well, we feel like the U.S. is now going to use its economic warfare against Afghanistan to increase that humanitarian crisis by withholding $9 billion that belongs to Afghanistan in U.S. banks, by working with other countries in Europe and the IMF to withhold funding. We don’t have to be friends with the Taliban, but we can’t be the enemies, either, because the victims will be the Afghan people. We need to let go of their funds. We need to provide generous humanitarian support. In fact, the U.S. should fund the entire $350 million urgent request made by the UNHCR, the refugee agency, because that’s equivalent to just one-and-a-half days of war in Afghanistan. So, we owe a lot to the people whose lives that we have helped destroy over these last 20 years."

"The U.S. corporate media usually report on Israeli military assaults in occupied Palestine as if the United States is an innocent neutral party to the conflict. In fact, large majorities of Americans have told pollsters for decades that they want the United States to be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But U.S. media and politicians betray their own lack of neutrality by blaming Palestinians for nearly all the violence and framing flagrantly disproportionate, indiscriminate and therefore illegal Israeli attacks as a justifiable response to Palestinian actions. The classic formulation from U.S. officials and commentators is that "Israel has the right to defend itself," never "Palestinians have the right to defend themselves," even as the Israelis massacre hundreds of Palestinian civilians, destroy thousands of Palestinian homes and seize ever more Palestinian land."

"US policy must be reversed to reflect international law and the shifting US opinion in favor of Palestinian rights. Every Member of Congress must be pushed to sign the bill introduced by Rep. Betty McCollum insisting that US funds to Israel are not used "to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law." Congress must also be pressured to quickly enforce the Arms Export Control Act and the Leahy Laws to stop supplying any more U.S. weapons to Israel until it stops using them to attack and kill civilians. The United States has played a vital and instrumental role in the decades-long catastrophe that has engulfed the people of Palestine. U.S. leaders and politicians must now confront their country's and, in many cases, their own personal complicity in this catastrophe, and act urgently and decisively to reverse U.S. policy to support full human rights for all Palestinians."

"The February meeting of NATO...defense ministers... revealed an antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China... NATO seems oblivious to the changing dynamics of today's world, as if it were living on a different planet. Its one-sided Reflection Group report cites Russia's violation of international law in Crimea as a principal cause of deteriorating relations with the West, and insists that Russia must "return to full compliance with international law." But it ignores the U.S. and NATO's far more numerous violations of international law and leading role in the tensions fueling the renewed Cold War:"

"Illegal invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq;"

"The broken agreement over NATO expansion into Eastern Europe;"

"U.S. withdrawals from important arms control treaties;"

"More than 300,000 bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the U.S. and its allies since 2001;"

"U.S. proxy wars in Libya and Syria, which plunged both countries into chaos, revived Al Qaeda and spawned the Islamic State;"

"U.S. management of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led to economic collapse, Russian annexation of Crimea and civil war in Eastern Ukraine;"

"The stark reality of the U.S. record as a serial aggressor whose offensive war machine dwarfs Russia's defense spending by 11 to 1 and China's by 2.8 to 1, even without counting other NATO countries' military spending."

"NATO's failure to seriously examine its own role in what it euphemistically calls "uncertain times" should be more alarming to Americans and Europeans than its one-sided criticisms of Russia and China, whose contributions to the uncertainty of our times pale by comparison."

"In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind quoted a Bush White House adviser, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." He dismissed Suskind's assumption that public policy must be rooted in "the reality-based community." "We're history's actors," the adviser told him, "and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America's international power and authority. Back in the imperial heartland, the political marketing industry that Rove and his colleagues were part of has had more success dividing and ruling the hearts and minds of Americans than of Iraqis, Russians or Chinese. The irony of the Bush administration's imperial pretensions was that America has been an empire from its very founding, and that a White House staffer's political use of the term "empire" in 2004 was not emblematic of a new and rising empire as he claimed, but of a decadent, declining empire stumbling blindly into an agonizing death spiral."

"Every successful empire has expanded, ruled and exploited its far-flung territories through a combination of economic and military power. Even in the American empire's neocolonial phase, the role of the U.S. military and the CIA was to kick open doors through which American businessmen could "follow the flag" to set up shop and develop new markets. But now U.S. militarism and America's economic interests have diverged. Apart from a few military contractors, American businesses have not followed the flag into the ruins of Iraq or America's other current war zones in any lasting way. Eighteen years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq's largest trading partner is China, while Afghanistan's is Pakistan, Somalia's is the United Arab Emirates and Libya's is the European Union. Instead of opening doors for American big business or supporting America's diplomatic position in the world, the U.S. war machine has become a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power to destabilize countries and wreck their economies, closing doors to economic opportunity instead of opening them, diverting resources from real needs at home, and damaging America's international standing instead of enhancing it."

"The immediate solution to this international crisis is for the United States to end its current wars and stop selling weapons to allies who wage war on their neighbors or kill civilians. Withdrawing U.S. occupation forces and ending U.S. airstrikes will allow the United Nations and the rest of the world to mobilize legitimate, impartial support programs to help America’s victims rebuild their lives and their societies. President Biden should offer generous U.S. war reparations to finance these programs, including the rebuilding of Mosul, Raqqa, and other cities destroyed by American bombardment. <BRTo prevent new U.S. wars, the Biden Administration should commit to participating and complying with the rules of international law, which are supposed to be binding on all countries, even the most wealthy and powerful. While paying lip service to the rule of law and a “rules-based international order,” the United States has in practice been recognizing only the law of the jungle and the principle of “might makes right,” as if the U.N. Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of force did not exist and the protected status of civilians under the Geneva Conventions was subject to the discretion of unaccountable U.S. government lawyers."

"The United States does not just wage war on children with bombs, missiles, and bullets. It also wages economic war in ways that disproportionately affect children, preventing countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea from importing essential food and medicines or obtaining the resources they need to buy them. These sanctions are a brutal form of economic warfare and collective punishment that leave children dying from hunger and preventable diseases, especially during this pandemic. U.N. officials have called for the International Criminal Court to investigate unilateral U.S. sanctions as crimes against humanity. The Biden Administration should immediately lift all unilateral economic sanctions. Will President Joe Biden act to protect the children of the world from America’s most tragic and indefensible war crimes? Nothing in his long record in public life suggests that he will, unless the American public, and the rest of the world, act collectively and effectively to insist that America must end its war on children and finally become a responsible, law-abiding member of the human family."

"Funny how Fareed Zakaria has a war criminal, Colin Powell, pontificating on Trump and the rule of law."

"Dressed in pink, she and her sister activists are regular fixtures at congressional hearings, directly challenging those in power by interrupting them from the audience…Benjamin told me that President Obama "said that I wasn't listening to him. I was hanging on every single word. I really expected to hear some major policy changes, and I didn't know whether I was going to speak up or not. If he had said something like, 'To show my commitment to Guantánamo, next week we will start releasing those prisoners who have been cleared,' or if he had said, 'We're taking drones out of the hands of the CIA immediately,' or, 'We're going to immediately say that signature strikes, where people are killed on the basis of suspicious behavior, will no longer be allowed'-if he had said anything like that, I wouldn't have spoken up." I then asked her why she objected to the New York Times describing her as a "heckler." "I think a heckler is a very negative term, and I think it's a positive thing when people find the courage to speak up to leaders who are not leading. And I didn't do what I did to embarrass the president. I did it because I feel that he needs to be pushed more, that it has been over four years now of policies that have been killing innocent people with drones. It has been now over eleven years that innocent people are still being held in Guantánamo and now being force-fed. These are crisis situations, and it requires more from us as citizens.""

"The reason why the U.S. Government must be prosecuted for its war-crimes against Iraq is that they are so horrific and there are so many of them, and international law crumbles until they become prosecuted and severely punished for what they did... On 15 March 2018, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies headlined at Alternet, “The Staggering Death Toll in Iraq” and wrote that “our calculations, using the best information available, show a catastrophic estimate of 2.4 million Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion,” and linked to solid evidence, backing up their estimate.... On 6 February 2020, BusinessInsider bannered “US taxpayers have reportedly paid an average of $8,000 each and over $2 trillion total for the Iraq war alone”, and linked to the academic analysis that supported this estimate. The U.S. regime’s invasive war, which the Bush gang perpetrated against Iraq, was also a crime against the American people (though Iraqis suffered far more from it than we did)."

"How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden."

"The United States of America should always stand for religious freedom for all people in all countries and should always work to that end."

"I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody … I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people."

"Hey @realdonaldtrump: being Saudi Arabia's bitch is not "America First.""

"Will you stand for the humanity of the Yemeni people? Will you stand against Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war? Or will you continue to support this war that has caused 22 million Yemeni people to be in desperate need of humanitarian aid? To cause these 85,000 children to have died from starvation, to have caused the dropping of U.S.-made bombs on innocent civilians, killing tens of thousands of people. This is such an urgent action that must be taken by the United States Congress to assert its authority and end United States support for this genocidal war in Yemen."

"Trump… Nikki Haley...Mike Pompeo... The people around John Bolton. These people are advocating for strengthening our economy, and if the only way they can do that is by building that economy based on building and selling weapons to countries that are using them to slaughter and murder innocent people, then we need new leaders in this country. The American people deserve better than that."

"I have decided to run and will be making a formal announcement within the next week. … There are a lot of reasons for me to make this decision. There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I'm concerned about and that I want to help solve … There is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace … I look forward to being able to get into this and to talk about it in depth when we make our announcement."

"When I deployed to Iraq with my fellow soldiers, putting our lives on the line for our country, no one questioned our patriotism because of our religion. No one asked whether we could be trusted because we were Jewish, Catholic, Muslim or atheist. We all took an oath to serve our country and defend the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. My military service has shaped who I am today. While in the Middle East, I saw how quickly religious sectarianism and bigotry can lead to the disintegration of a country — how leaders manipulate people to fear others who are different, who look different or who have different beliefs. I also experienced how we as people of the world have more in common than we think. Beneath our various beliefs and appearances is our common humanity. This commitment to equality and justice for all is the ideal that our country was founded upon and that we continue to aspire to as people. We cannot be complacent and must vigilantly affirm this again and again, as bigotry and hatred have an insidious way of seeping into our society."

"Our country was established on the basis of freedom of religion, and the Constitution states there would never be any religious test for any public office. It is a freedom enshrined in our Constitution, and that every member of Congress takes an oath to protect — a freedom that many heroes have given their lives to defend. Nothing is more important to our democracy than this freedom."

"The fact that marijuana's still a Schedule I drug is unacceptable in the harm that it is causing to the people of our country and to taxpayers as well...The impact this has on individuals, potentially leading to criminal records that impact them, their families, their ability to get a job, housing, financial aid for college—the impacts of this are great..."

"I don't smoke marijuana. I never have... But I believe firmly in every person's freedom to make their own choices, and that people should not be thrown in jail and incarcerated or made into criminals for choosing to smoke marijuana whether it be for medicinal and non-medicinal purposes."

"There's no question that this overall war on drugs has not only been a failure, it has created and exacerbated a number of other problems that continue to afflict people in this country..."

"Let me say that there is no one in our government, at any level, who has the right to tell any American who they should be allowed to love or who they should be allowed to marry. My record in Congress for over six years shows my commitment to fighting for LGBTQ equality. I serve on the equality caucus and recently voted for passage of the Equality Act... Maybe many people in this county can relate to the fact that I grew up in a socially conservative home, held views when I was very young that I no longer hold today. I served with LGBT service members both in training and deployed downrange. I know that they would give their life me, and I would give my life for them."

"How can you say Saudi Arabia is a great partner in fighting terrorism when they are fueling and funding terrorist groups in Yemen?"

"If they can falsely portray me as a traitor, then they can do it to anyone -- and in fact, that's exactly the message they want to get across to you... If you stand up to Hillary and the party power brokers -- if you stand up to the rich and powerful elite and the war machine, they will destroy you and discredit your message. But, here is the truth: They will not intimidate us. They will not silence us."

"People warned me in 2016 that my endorsement of Bernie Sanders would be the end of my 'political career' -- they said Clinton would never forget... that she and her rich and powerful friends -- her allies in politics and the media -- will make sure you're destroyed."

"The New York Times and CNN have smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime-change war. Just two days ago, The New York Times put out an article saying I'm a Russian asset and an Assad apologist, and all these different smears. This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I'm an asset of Russia. Completely despicable."

"Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain."

"Warmongers argue that we must protect Ukraine because it is a “democracy.” But they’re lying. Ukraine isn't actually a democracy. To hold onto power, Ukraine's president shut down the 3 TV stations that criticized him, and imprisoned the head of the opposition political party which came in 2nd place in the election, and arrested and jailed its leaders (exactly what Putin has been accused of doing)—all with the support of U.S."

"I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party. It’s now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution."

"Political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear intentions between nuclear powers. Perhaps it's because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won't have access."

"Gabbard may be a progressive vote on social and environmental issues, but on defense she’s solidly pro-military. … "I understand firsthand the value of using counter-terrorism warfare tactics and strategies overseas in dealing with 21st century threats," she said. "But these tactics should never be used against our own citizens here at home. Just as U.S. law enforcement strategies do not apply in war with a foreign enemy, drone strikes and other counter-terrorism tactics should not be targeting non-combatant U.S. citizens." "I think there’s no question that the use of drones in civilian causalities is absolutely wrong, as well as the use of drones against American citizens who have the right to due process within our own system." … And that’s the all of Gabbard’s March 8 statement on drones. She said much the same thing on Meet the Press on March 10, insisting that drone attacks needed to occur over "enemy territory." Gabbard is saying that she supports the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists, including those born in the U.S., as long as it happens overseas. Her use of qualifiers like "at home" and "non-combatant" make that clear. This is identical to current U.S. policy."

"On July 29, the U.S. House of Representatives, with more than 100 co-sponsors from both parties, passed a resolution by unanimous consent insisting that the Israeli attacks were exclusively "focused on terrorist targets" and that Israel "goes to extraordinary lengths to target only terrorist actors." Co-sponsors included such prominent Democrats as Alan Grayson (FL), Jared Polis (CO), Eric Swalwell (CA), Richard Neal (MA), Joseph Kennedy (MA), Tulsi Gabbard (HI), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Brad Sherman (CA), Elliot Engel (NY), and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz (FL)"

"Gabbard initially refused to say who financed her trip to Syria. However, in a press release Wednesday Gabbard revealed her delegation had been "led and sponsored by" an outfit called the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services (AACCESS—Ohio). Her statement added she and the rest of the delegation had been accompanied by two men, Elie and Bassam Khawam. Who, then, are the Khawams? Gabbard’s press release described the pair as "longtime peace advocates." In truth, Bassam and Elie Khawam are both officials in the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), a political party and paramilitary organization founded in Lebanon in 1932, and currently actively engaged in the Syrian civil war on the side of the Assad regime. The pair are two of the key U.S.-based point men for the party — and, by extension, the Syrian dictatorship. On its home turf of Lebanon, the SSNP is known for many things, peace advocacy not being one of them."

"All politicians must act as if they enjoy patriotic ceremonies, but Gabbard is one of the few who seem as if they were not acting. She is thirty-six, and has a knack for projecting both youthful joy and grownup gravitas. Her political profile is similarly hybrid. She is a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter with equally fervent bipartisan tendencies — known, roughly equally, for her concern for the treatment of veterans and her opposition to U.S. intervention abroad. She is also a vegetarian and a practicing Hindu — the first Hindu ever elected to Congress — as well as a lifelong surfer and an accomplished athlete. On Capitol Hill, she is often regarded as a glamorous anomaly: a Hawaiian action figure, fabulously out of place among her besuited colleagues. “She’s almost straight from central casting, if you need a heroine,” Van Jones, the progressive activist, says."

"The wake up call, for most of us, came when Gabbard met with Trump soon after his inauguration and then with Assad, instead of marching on DC with us and the rest of the Hawaii’s congressional delegation during the Women’s March in protest of what has become an unprecedented abolition of human and civil rights in America. … The incumbent clearly has an agenda that does not involve her constituents and we are waking up to the fact that our needs are taking a back seat to her ambitions."

"Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard — who typically chooses words carefully — lit up the internet Wednesday with a scathing tweet criticizing President Trump for standing by Saudi Arabia’s rulers despite the murder of journalist. The tweet, which included a profane word, has been liked more than 70,000 times and generated national headlines. And her office made clear that the tweet wasn’t a slip-up, but reflected her true feelings. Political onlookers say it’s the latest example of a Hawaii politician, like those on the mainland, using profane and at-times crass language to try cut through the noise and make a point."

"Whether Gabbard will mount a bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president is something she said she’s "thinking through very carefully." … Gabbard would join a crowded Democratic field if she does run. By some estimates it may include more 30 people, many of whom, like former Vice President Joe Biden, have decades more experience and greater name recognition. Yet she won't have to worry about standing out. She's almost guaranteed to be the youngest. Right now, she's barely old enough to run. The Constitution requires the president to be at least 35. She's part Samoan, part Caucasian. She's the first Hindu elected to Congress, and was sworn into office with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita. Her parents homeschooled her and her four siblings. She's a combat veteran. She was first elected to office at age 21, when she won a seat in the Hawaii state House of Representatives. She surfs in her spare time."

"The first Hindu woman to serve in the House, Gabbard would be the youngest US president ever if she wins; she'll be 39 on Inauguration Day 2021."

"While most candidates shy away from foreign policy, Congressmember Gabbard has made foreign policy—particularly ending war—the centerpiece of her campaign. She was truly impressive in her March 10 CNN Town Hall, talking more honestly about U.S. wars than any other presidential candidate in recent history. Gabbard promises to end senseless wars like the one she witnessed as a National Guard officer in Iraq. She unequivocally states her opposition to U.S. "regime change" interventions, as well as the New Cold War and arms race with Russia, and supports rejoining the Iran nuclear deal. She was also an original cosponsor of Rep. Khanna's Yemen War Powers bill. Gabbard still believes in a militarized approach to counterterrorism, despite studies showing that this feeds a self-perpetuating cycle of violence on both sides... She is still in the military herself and embraces what she calls a "military mindset." She ended her CNN Town Hall by saying that being Commander-in-Chief is the most important part of being president."

"Tulsi Gabbard was made to answer for her past advocacy for traditional marriage during the first 2020 Democratic primary debate. The weird thing is: The Hawaii congresswoman was the only candidate required all Wednesday evening to address controversial past statements and actions. That is bizarre, considering the debate lineup featured candidates with ugly personal histories and some with actual criminal backgrounds."

"Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard have been listed by Ukraine among a number of American politicians, academics and activists Kyiv claims have promoted "Russian propaganda."... The list was compiled by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation, founded in 2021 by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky... Former Rep. Gabbard said that the U.S. had provoked Putin for many years and that there are 25 dangerous biolabs in Ukraine that could release deadly pathogens."

"Why critics say Gabbard is a controversial choice for spy chief on CNN"

"Trained chauvinists. When they get together, they talk about pussy. I heard them talk, and there was no genuine intimacy. When I first met them, I thought they were such macho boobs. Then I got to know some of them separately, in a way they won’t reveal to each other, and they were totally different human beings. Women with any wisdom look at men doing that macho number and are embarrassed for the guys. We know it’s bullshit, that it comes out of insecurity. They just don’t know we know."

"A lot of women sit around going, ‘We’re so oppressed by men, look what they’ve done to us!’ And you end up with a fucking Sylvia Plath, with her martyred little stupid head in the oven. This one night I was really depressed, and I thought, ‘Sylvia Plath in Malibu!’ So I said to myself, ‘Stop sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, Kidder. Smarten up and take the next step….’ Self-pity is a bore."

"A man is just another thing that needs time, and giving, and I don’t have it in me at this point in my life. Strangely, I think I have to be alone to be myself. That’s a paradox, and something else I can’t face, because I love men, and I love sex. Sex is the one place where I feel safe, where I feel I can get together with men."

"Listen, I’ve never done anything in moderation in my life. I’ve always been addicted to excess. I mean, this whole concept of moderation is something I yearn for."

"I'm not choosy at all! I'll do practically anything. I'm the biggest whore on the block. I live in a little town in Montana, and you have to drag me out of here to get to L.A., so I'm not readily available. But unless it's something sexist or cruel, I just love to work. I've done all sorts of things, but you just haven't seen them because they're often very bad and shown at 4 in the morning."

"I really don’t like the practice of outing people who haven’t outed themselves. It’s horrendously cruel and insensitive to that particular person’s own needs. The fragility of the human heart is something that we need to start respecting, and so to out someone who doesn’t want to be outed is unnecessary. There are groups who believe they should out famous people, and I find it so small. With political activism, there are many ways to achieve your goals. The trick is to get to the top of the mountain; it’s not how you get there."

"Discrimination takes many forms, and if you look at the root of it, it’s fear, envy, jealousy, and a lot of ugly, petty emotions."

"We’re here as citizens of the planet, as victims of the pollution that’s been carelessly dumped into our land, air and sea for generations, and as children whose rights are being violated. Today we are fighting back. 30 years ago the world made a promise to us. Virtually every country in the world agreed that children have rights that must be protected. And those countries that signed the 3rd Optional Protocol on Communication have committed to allowing us to appeal to the United Nations when those rights are being violated. So that’s exactly what we’re doing here today. Each one of use had our rights violated and denied. Our futures are being destroyed."

"I see more of the structures that society has put in place. And that’s why my generation has been so impactful with the climate movement. We’re organizing outside of the structures that adults work in. Since getting involved, I just see how the system is broken, and it’s one of the things that needs to change."

"My name is Alexandria Villaseñor. I’m 14 years old. I’m from New York. And I am here because 30 years ago the world signed a contract between generations that the present world would leave a world worth inheriting to the future. And today I want to tell the world, you are defaulting on that contract, and we’re here to collect."

"Eighty years from now, our grandchildren can yell, 'Hey Zoomers.""

"Alexandria Villasenor is a powerhouse in the climate change world — and she’s not even old enough to vote.... when she learned that rising temperatures caused by climate change are making wildfires more commonplace and destructive than ever — and that the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 to avoid disastrous, irreversible consequences of an overheated planet — Villasenor knew she had to act fast."

"She took the stage at Battery Park on Friday before a crowd of two hundred and fifty thousand climate strikers. “Hi, everyone!” she hollered, a huge smile on her face. She told the story of how she started striking, then introduced Thunberg. “She is an icon of our time, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize,” Villaseñor said. “And now she’s here with us today. What I want to tell you about Greta Thunberg, though, is that she is the nicest, kindest, most humble person I ever met.” As Thunberg walked onstage, she gave Villaseñor a big hug."

"Many people in the US aren't aware of the youth climate movement that was started by 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg in August 2018 and has inspired students in countries all across the world to come together to protest for climate action weekly. But the fact that Fridays for Future (FFF) is less well known stateside doesn't mean that young activists in the US are less passionate... A couple of hours north of the Capitol, Alexandria Villasenor was striking in New York City. The 14-year-old moved to the big apple from Davis, California, last August. In November 2018 she was back in California for a visit and experienced the raging Paradise wildfire first hand. "The smoke was so bad I had to go back to New York early," the middle schooler, who suffers from asthma, said. "Then I learned about the connection between the wildfires and the climate crisis. It made me angry." She also runs her own organization, Earth Uprising. How does she balance all of that with her school work and regular student life? "I can do pretty much anything when I get enough food and five hours of sleep," Villasenor said with a laugh."

"I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don't know how to do that."

"Looking out your window today, the weather you see doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. The earth is big and complicated — and there’s a big time lag in the system. People need to understand that. You know, many people, many scientists, many journalists keep trying to impress that upon the public. It obviously isn’t working very well, but we keep trying."

"I think what all nonfiction writers are aiming for is to make people think about things differently — to tell you a story from somewhere that, if you’re vaguely familiar with it, challenges what you think you know about it, or, if it’s a story you’ve never heard before, introduces you to a whole new place or a whole new idea. I’m basically trying to tilt your worldview a little bit."

"I think that people are aware of the potential impacts of climate change on Arctic species. You know, everyone has seen the pictures of the poor polar bears, you know, as the sea ice shrinks. But really, where climate change could have an even more devastating impact is in the tropics, both because most species live in the tropics—that’s just where the abundance of life is—and also because these species tend to have a very, very narrow tolerance for climatic change. They’re used to a lot of climatic stability."

"now the sort of general theory is, you know, yes, the Earth changes very slowly, except for these extraordinary moments. And I’d say the whole point of writing the book is that we are in one of those moments right now."

"you have a situation where we really need to be taking serious action on climate change, and we’re still having this surreal—I guess I would use the word—debate over whether it’s happening or not. And I think a clip like that shows that, you know, people are really speaking entirely different languages. We’re just not even speaking to each other using—you know, we’re using English, but we’re not really speaking the same language. We’re not looking at the same—well, some people are looking at scientific data, and some people are not, let me just put it that way. And it’s very, very hard to carry on, you know, a reasonable and sort of post-Enlightenment conversation."

"massive things need to be done. Obviously we need to start transitioning our whole economy off of fossil fuels. That’s not—that’s not a small thing. That’s a big thing. And if you were going to ask, you know, policy experts what we should do, they would say, “Well, we need some kind of price on carbon.” Now, that is—that requires legislative action. In the absence of that, in the absence of putting a price on putting CO2 into the atmosphere, there are things the administration can do and that they are supposedly working on—you know, power plant regulations that would reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s very difficult to get the kind of action that we need without any hope of getting anything through Congress."

"we’ve already set so many changes in motion, right? I mean, climate change is occurring; whatever anyone in Congress says, it’s occurring right now. You can watch, and scientists are watching, tracking species on the move all over the planet, trying to track the climate as it changes, so either moving upslope or moving toward the poles. And to the extent that we can preserve any parts of the planet that are not being chopped up or chopped down, so that we can allow species to move where they need to go, to track climate change, that is one thing that we can do, even as climate change unfolds. And unfortunately, climate change has been set in motion so that, really, though we desperately need to reduce our carbon emissions, we’re not stopping that process anytime in the near future, so that we need to start thinking about, you know, a world in which everything is on the move and preserving corridors that things can migrate through."

"We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach... We're sort of unraveling that. ... We're doing, it's often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don't know what the end point is going to be."

"The definition, I suppose, would be many, many organisms across many, many different groups. And that is, really, what we are seeing and that is what makes scientists fear ... that we're in a mass extinction. ... About a quarter of all mammals are considered endangered. ... About 40 percent of all amphibians are considered endangered. But we're also seeing organisms, invertebrates, for example, are endangered ... many species of reef-building corals are now considered very, very endangered. So you're seeing extinctions across a wide variety of groups, and that, I think, would have to be one of the defining characteristics of a mass extinction."

"After a mass extinction, it has generally tended to take many millions of years for life to recover. It's not something that you bounce back from, from one day to the next."

"one of the country’s leading science journalists."

"I will argue that native societies' knowledge surpasses the scientific and social knowledge of the dominant society in its ability to provide information and a management style for environmental planning. Frankly, these native societies have existed as the only example of sustainable living in North America for more than 300 years."

""Minobimaatisiiwin," or the "good life," is the basic objective of the Anishinaabeg and Cree³ people who have historically, and to this day, occupied a great portion of the north-central region of the North American continent. An alternative interpretation of the word is "continuous rebirth." This is how we traditionally understand the world and how indigenous societies have come to live within natural law. Two tenets are essential to this paradigm: cyclical thinking and reciprocal relations and responsibilities to the Earth and creation."

"Rarely is there money in the federal bureaucracy for the cultural and environmental needs of the Natives. I find it ironic however, that federal monies always miraculously appear to study and develop coal strip miners, uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps on Reservations."

"The Earth is our Mother. From her we get our life, and our ability to live. It is our responsibility to care for our Mother, and in caring for our Mother, we care for ourselves."

"What gives corporations like Conoco, Shell, Exxon, Daishowa, ITT, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the World Bank the right which supersedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women? What law gives that right to them? Not any law of the Creator or of Mother Earth. Is that right contained within their wealth? Is that right contained within their wealth, which was historically acquired immorally, unethically through colonialism and imperialism and paid for with the lives of millions of people, species of plants, and entire ecosystems? They should have no such right. And we clearly, as women and as indigenous peoples, demand and will recover that right-the right of self-determination, to determine our own destiny and that of our future generations."

"Today, on a worldwide scale, we remain in the same situation as one hundred years ago, only with less land and fewer people."

"Simply stated, if we can no longer nurse our children, if we can no longer bear children, and if our bodies are wracked with poisons, we will have accomplished little in the way of determining our destiny or improving our conditions."

"Consumption causes the commodification of the sacred, the natural world, cultures, children, and women. And unless we speak and take meaningful action to address the high levels of consumption, we will never have any security for our individual human rights as women."

"This is not a struggle for women of the dominant society in so-called "first world" countries to have equal pay and equal status if that pay and status continues to be based on a consumption model that is unsustainable. It is a struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth."

"The framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that document, but had little idea of what was to come. Since that time we've seen the land of the continent change dramatically-culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically. Today, the social and technological foundation of the society has, in fact, outstripped the law itself. It's time to amend the Constitution to preserve "the commons" for all of us. It's time for a Common Property, or Seventh Generation, Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."

"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares as one of its purposes, to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our posterity." Should not those blessings include air fit to breathe, water decent enough to drink, and land which is as beautiful for our descendants as it was for our ancestors?"

"American public policy has come to reflect short-term interests, fiscal years, "deficit reduction" programs, and is increasingly absent of any intergenerational perspective. That long-term perspective is crucial to our well-being and a valuable role for democratic government."

"Public policy is lagging behind our ability to destroy ourselves."

"If private property has found safe haven in the Fifth Amendment, where is common property equally protected?"

"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These most basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air or water, thereby taking life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. These rights are also damaged by those who cause a crash of our fish or destroy our oceans. Such "taking" must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as a taking of private property is a fundamental wrong."

"It's hard to imagine those who framed the U.S. Constitution could have imagined the U.S. at the millennium. It's harder yet to imagine what we'll pass on, if we don't think of the seventh generation from now."

"There is a peculiar kind of hatred in the northwoods, a hatred born of living with with three generations of complicity in the theft of lives and land. What is worse is that each day, those who hold this position of privilege must come face to face with those whom they have dispossessed. To others who rightfully should share in the complicity and the guilt, Indians are far away and long ago. But in reservation border towns, Indians are ever-present."

"the poverty of dispossession is almost overwhelming. So is the poverty of complicity and guilt. That shame combined with guilt and a feeling of powerlessness, creates an atmosphere in which hatred buds, blossoms and flourishes. The hatred passes from father to son and from mother to daughter. Each generation feels the hatred and it penetrates deeper to justify a myth. Norman Grist suffered from Indian Hating Disease. He had it bad, knotted tightly and pungently in his gut"

"Native American teachings describe the relations all around-animals, fish, trees, and rocks as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together."

"There is a direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity."

"While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of the most invasive industrial interventions imaginable."

"In the final analysis, the survival of Native America is fundamentally about the collective survival of all human beings. The question of who gets to determine the destiny of the land, and of the people who live on it-those with the money or those who pray on the land-is a question that is alive throughout society."

"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares its intent to be to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves, and our posterity." In reality, U.S. laws have been transformed by corporate interests to cater to elite interests in society."

"The challenge at the cusp of the millennium is to transform human laws to match natural laws, not vice versa. And to correspondingly transform wasteful production and voracious consumption. America and industrial society must move from a society based on conquest to one steeped in the practice of survival. In order to do that, we must close the circle. The linear nature of industrial production itself, in which labor and technology turn natural wealth into consumer products and wastes, must be transformed into a cyclical system."

"There is, in many Indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be."

"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air, water, and land. Contaminating the commons must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as defacing private property is wrong. On that basis, the Seventh Generation Amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, "The right of citizens of the U.S. to enjoy and use air, water, sunlight, and other renewable resources determined by the Congress to be common property shall not be impaired, nor shall such use impair their availability for use by the future generations.""

"I always greet people in my language because I believe that cultural diversity is as beautiful as biodiversity, and that is reflected in language."

"I am fully aware of how little an American education teaches you about Native people."

"While I was introduced as an activist, I consider myself more a concerned parent. To be a mother in this day and age, you have to be concerned with a wide array of issues."

"I haven't seen anyone improve on the tepee-you can have a fire inside it, and you can love it."

"A house is more than a shelter: It is home, it is something that reflects you."

"In Minnesota, they say we made nice about it a long time ago. They say, "You Indians should get over it." Well that's really nice to say when you are holding all the assets. Why are Indian people the poorest people in this country in every economic or social statistic at the bottom or the top of where you don't want to be? Is that because we're stupid? No. It's because we have structural poverty enforced by intergenerational appropriation of our wealth. That's the reality."

"Forests are worth more standing than cut."

"I spend a lot of time fighting with county commissioners because they look at my reservation and refer to it as timber resources; I call it a forest. It's a very different way of thinking. I do not look out there and see timber resources; I see a forest. That does not mean that I'm opposed to logging. It does mean that I'm opposed to lazy logging, which is what I call clear-cutting. You can selectively cut in a beautiful manner, and leave a forest standing."

"Just because the coal exists, do they have to strip mine it? Just because the water flows, does that mean they have to dam it? Just because the trees are there, does that mean they have to cut them? At what point do we restrain ourselves in this society so that something is left because it has value on its own?"

"Sometimes when you ask people to consume less, to not use it and toss it, there's this puzzled look like, "That sounds painful. That sounds like I'm not going to really get what I want, and I have a right to it." That's what we have to deconstruct."

"There should be beauty in "process," whether it is harvesting with intelligence, whether it is the use of recycled materials, or whether it is observing energy efficiency."

"We have a lot of teachings and language about how a people can live a thousand years in the same place and not destroy things. The phrase anishinaabe akiing, for example, means the land to which the people belong. It’s not the same thing as private property or even common property. It has to do with a relationship that a people has to a place—a relationship that reaffirms the sacredness of that place…"

"And in our covenant with the Creator, we understand that it is not about managing their behavior—it’s about managing ours, because we’re the ones who cause extinction of species. We’re the youngest species, and we don’t necessarily have the most smarts. We’ve bungled up along the way, and we acknowledge these mistakes in our stories and in our history as Indian people. The question is whether you have the humility and the commitment to get some learning out of these experiences."

"The first 100 days of the Bush Administration have been an unbelievable nightmare."

"George W Bush is definitely the worse of two evils, to use the vernacular of the Green Party. Few of us thought it possible for him to be in office today, and we are still stunned."

"The largest party in America: the more than 50% of the American electorate who don't vote"

"It's hard to tell people to vote when their votes don't seem to count."

"I pledge myself to raise my voice, raise my vote, raise every ounce of strength I have to keep up our struggle and to continue it all-demand that votes get counted, struggle for a set of systems that work, and work to protect Mother Earth."

""Akiing" is the word for land in our language, and in the indigenous concept of land ownership or the Anishinaabeg concept of land ownership, it is much more a concept that we belong to that land than the land belongs to us."

"There was a view at that time which is, to a great extent, maintained today: that only those Christian nations had rights to the land. That only those who were in the folds of the church and were in the folds of Christ had rights to the land, and the rest of the vast majority of the world, who were not Christians, did not have rights to land on par with those who were Christians. That is why the church became a "handmaiden to colonialism.""

"The Catholic Church was one of the architects of colonialism as we have come to know it today, because it provided the philosophical and religious underpinnings through which colonialism could continue and be justified in the eyes of God."

"How come there are so many mountains named after small men? Who were these guys? Why did they get these mountains named after them? You go out there and these little puny men have mountains named after them, and some of these men were really, really bad guys."

"In this day and age, are we going to name towns after Hitler? Probably not but, you know, you have a number of towns, cities, and colleges, named after guys who were basically mass murderers. And it is really offensive as indigenous people, but it is also offensive humanitarians to consider that we continue to aggrandize individuals whose crimes are crimes against humanity."

"There is this saying in Indian country that I think is true, which is that, a long time ago, when the white people came, the Indians had the land and the white people had the Bibles. And now the Indians have the Bibles and the white people have the land."

"The reality is that there is a direct relationship between the "development" of the United States and the "underdevelopment" of Native America. Just as much as there is a direct relationship between the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa; and the development of the United States and the underdevelopment of Africa. Some get rich and some get poor. Some take other's land, natural resources, and people, and some are left to deal with the consequences of it. Which is the history."

"The reality is that the founding fathers were land speculators. The fact is that you couldn't vote in this country if you did not own land, and that basically you had to be a white man who owned land. Now how did they get that land? They basically had to steal it from someone, and that would probably be the Indians."

"I have heard that a number of times in my life. "You guys should get over it, it happened a long time ago." You cannot get over it if you are still in the same circumstance as a consequence of what happened a hundred years ago. You cannot get over it if you are still in exactly the same relationship as you were a hundred years ago. Some try to keep their trees and some try to take them."

"The white man, or the American government, has a way of saying they are sorry, which is to pay you. That's pretty much their approach. Now what our elders have said in our reservation and in Indian country in general is that actually the only compensation for land is land. That you cannot pay us with money that you took, that you made off of our land. That's kind of the analysis that goes behind that. Because the only thing that is actually of value to our community is the land itself. It is not the compensation."

"Within a decade of the completion of the La Grande Complex, signs of environmental disasters have become obvious. Massive flooding had once again leached methyl Mercury from the soil, changing an inorganic Mercury compound in the water into organic mercury."

"Winona LaDuke became involved in Native American issues after meeting Jimmy Durham, a well known Cherokee activist, while she was attending Harvard University. At the age of 18, she spoke in front of the United Nations regarding Native American rights and has remained one of the most prominent voices for American Indian economic and environmental concerns."

"A Navajo woman said to me, “In our old mythologies and stories, they talked of monster slayers.” She says we need a new generation of monster slayers. I think that’s such a powerful analogy, and it’s so true. It’s a David and Goliath moment, and we’ve got to hang in there because they are weakening…"

"It’s so ironic and so tragic, this dichotomy between the large oil corporations and the people who have always stood for their land. To all of us it was a Selma moment, that’s how I look at it. And if you contextualize it in the history of American movements and social movements, Standing Rock is a Selma moment when we all woke up, we all woke up and said, “This is what it looks like on the front lines.”…"

"I’m looking down the barrel of a very big pipeline, which is a $7 billion boondoggle of stranded assets. We’ll talk about that later. But I’m looking down the pipeline, you know, at the barrel of this pipeline, and I’m looking: What could $7 billion do in Minnesota? What could it do to make a New Green Deal?"

"I didn’t really like this economy too much. Didn’t work out too well for my people, you know."

"So the next economy has to be something that reaffirms our relationship to the Earth and gives us a shot. That, to me, looks like a lot of local food, organic food."

"You know, you don’t need some guys to put something in the sky to keep the carbon out of the sky. You need to put it in the soil. And so you need organic agriculture. That’s what we’re doing in my community."

"What I want to do is to rebuild the hemp industry in Indian country. And I want us at the table, not on the menu. I want us to be in the leadership of this next economy, because we have a lot of territory upon which you can grow hemp. And we can rebuild the light manufacturing industry in this country."

"To the Native community, (Trump)’s kind of like the new incarnation of Andrew Jackson: you know, bad president for Indian people, bad president for everybody. But, you know, to us, and to be super honest, I mean, we don’t have a lot of experience with great presidents. You know, what we have experience with is that we’re going to fight this out, and we’re going to make the next economy. We’re going to make our future. That’s what self-determination is about."

"Standing Rock was an example of regulatory capture, when your whole system is controlled by corporations"

"Social movements and lawyers are who stop pipelines. Social movements and lawyers."

"Lakes that you can still drink from. That's where I live. And that’s what this battle is about. It’s about, you know: Can we protect that?"

"What we need is a New Deal that builds infrastructure for people, not for oil companies. As I said, $7 billion that is for an oil company pipeline, that could be spent much better."

"There’s a price to destroying boreal forest."

"The tar sands is a boreal forest. You know, and you turn something that is the oxygen of the North—I mean, the boreal forest of northern Canada—of Canada is the equivalent of the lungs. It’s the Amazon of the North. It’s the Amazon of the North. And that is what is being destroyed by the tar sands. Wetland—this is just going through our wetlands. The value of a wetland—you know, I’m an economist by training, but how do you value a wetland for what it does for Mother Earth and for the planet and for your water and for insects and for where the wild things are?"

"As I look out there, this is the time of, you know, catastrophes of biblical proportions, if we are going to call it that. You know, to the south, you have the great floods. To the west, the entire West Coast is on fire. To the north, the ice is melting, and polar bears are eating each other."

"One time I was sitting in Sitka, Alaska—did you ever get a chance to go there? Beautiful. Like sometimes you just go someplace. I was at a writers’ workshop. I was in Sitka, Alaska, and I was watching—you know, the eagles were capturing the salmon that had come in. And so there was like eagles diving down into the ocean, and, you know, the salmon. And there were bears. And I looked out there, and I saw this cruise ship coming into the left of my vision. And it came in, and I was like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” The cruise ship came in, and then I watched that cruise ship turn a 180 and go exactly back out. And that’s basically what we’ve got to do. You know, we have to make the next economy, and that next economy is going to be green. That next economy is going to have people like me making decisions. I’d like to be an architect for the next economy. I didn’t like the last one."

"Indian people know how to take care of this land."

"The public lands and the Native lands should be protected for the public and the Natives, not necessarily some mining corporations."

"Deb (Haaland)’s history here with a vision that she and other leaders have had in Washington with a just transition and the Green New Deal is exactly what we need in this country. We don’t need any more fossil fuels. We’re done. We’re done. What we need is the vision and a just transition."

"I think that we should be done with appointing corporate heads to run parts of our government. They have enough influence already."

"Enbridge was 28% of DAPL. And when the federal court ordered them to close down the pipe, they said no. When the state of Michigan ordered them to close down a pipe this last May, they said no. So they’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior."

"It’s so tragic that, you know, on one hand, the Biden administration is like, “We are going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.” Same thing, you know, Klobuchar and Smith, the two Minnesota senators, shameful their lack of courage, not only for Indigenous people but for the planet"

"Enbridge and the Walz administration are climate criminals."

"The Biden administration needs to stand up. You know, on one hand, I’m looking at Joe Biden, and I’m so grateful. Like, Bears Ears, that was the right thing to do, you know, to get back and to be the people that are supporting Indigenous people and Land Back...You know, 80 million acres of national parks stolen from Indian people, let’s start returning those, too, along with creating new national parks. We could just start returning land that was stolen. That would be a great step."

"No sane person supports this pipeline. Only people who want to take oil money from Canadian multinationals support this pipeline."

"If you appoint Indian people, don’t just make them pretty Indian people that sit in your administration. Let them do their job. Indigenous thinking is what we need in the colonial administration. That’s when change happens."

"Seventy-five percent of the world’s mining corporations are Canadian, and all through Latin America there’s human rights violations."

"In her book The Militarization of Indian Country, Anishinaabe activist and writer Winona LaDuke analyzes the continuing negative effects of the military on Native Americans, considering the consequences wrought on Native economy, land, future, and people, especially Native combat veterans and their families. Indigenous territories in New Mexico bristle with nuclear weapons storage, and Shoshone and Paiute territories in Nevada are scarred by decades of aboveground and underground nuclear weapons testing. The Navajo Nation and some New Mexico Pueblos have experienced decades of uranium strip mining, the pollution of water, and subsequent deadly health effects. "I am awed by the impact of the military on the world and on Native America," LaDuke writes. "It is pervasive.""

"There is no Indigenous group in the US whose relationships to ancestral foods has not been severely impacted, if not completely disrupted. Some of these are well known, having been extensively documented, and no one has written more powerfully or prolifically on the issue than Winona LaDuke. LaDuke is the quintessential Indigenous eco-warrior, making her mark in larger Indigenous environmental justice conversation not only as a researcher but also as an activist who has worked tirelessly for decades in her own White Earth reservation community to protect Ojibwe access to wild rice, known to them as manoomin...Another high-profile issue LaDuke has written about is the disruption of the Klamath nation's relationship with salmon and sucker fish."

"We ended up having a long, wide-ranging conversation about the difference between an extractivist mind-set (which Leanne Simpson describes bluntly as "stealing" and taking things "out of relationship") and a regenerative one. She described Anishinaabe systems as "a way of living designed to generate life, not just human life but the life of all living things." This is a concept of balance, or harmony, common to many Indigenous cultures and is often translated to mean "the good life." But Simpson told me that she preferred the translation "continuous rebirth," which she first heard from fellow Anishinaabe writer and activist Winona LaDuke."

"The most biologically and culturally diverse place on the planet is under massive attack right now. The itself could be gone in a matter of the next 10 years. […] Unfortunately, one of the biggest causes of deforestation—definitely in the Brazilian Amazon—is agribusiness. Cattle, cattle grazing, and soy production in particular. […] People who were standing up against the lobbyists and the interests, the special interests, the cattle industry, the agribusiness industry, what was happening to them? A lot of people who were speaking out got killed. […] There’s people who were putting themselves out there and saying cattle ranching is destroying the Amazon. […] A lot of people will speak up, but a lot of people just keep their mouths shut because they don’t wanna be the next one with the bullet to their head."

"It is only in the cracks of division that corruption can seep in and pollution can spew out."

"Civil Rights are Human Rights and human rights are Environmental Rights… NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT."

"My message to him, my message to President Trump, would be that there is no more time to continue to accept money from the fossil fuel industry. There’s no more time to continue to be bought off and paid for, because this is our lives that we’re fighting for. We’re fighting for our children. We’re fighting for our sisters and brothers. We’re fighting for people that are drowning."

"I founded OneMillionOfUs to empower, educate, and register one million young people to vote in the 2020 elections and beyond. As a great and honorable president once said, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” We are no longer waiting, we are acting."

"I am here on behalf of young people worldwide. For the young girl in Guatemala starving because of drought; for the young boy in Sumatra whose entire rainforest community is set ablaze for the extraction of palm oil; for the mother in Beijing who attended her 3-year-old daughter’s funeral because she breathed in the toxic air of the city. I speak for the millions suffering at the destructive hands of the fossil fuel industry."

"When I interned for the American Hero, the Honorable John Lewis, I learned that this will be a tough fight, yet we must be determined to stand against injustice. Civil Rights are Human Rights and human rights are Environmental Rights… NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT."

"History shows that voting is the sword that cuts through all injustice."

"One person, one vote is the great equalizer of humanity."

"My mission is to show that we have the power to create a more just democracy that represents all of us."

"I’ve found that if I can't come up with even an inkling of how my mind might be changed, then I'm not really thinking at all; I'm just set on holding on to my current beliefs."

"The clever part is that it changes the question from, Who should I believe? to, What should I do? After all, the physical world is unaffected by our beliefs. It reacts only to our actions."

"I was left with a great idea gutted by critical examination. But that's good. That's how we make ideas better—by trying to poke holes in them and then finding ways to fix the holes."

"Scientists are trained to not give absolute answers. It is interesting that in recent years, some have started to do so when talking with the media, because they've learned that whenever they include the very scientific words possibly, perhaps, and uncertainty, their conclusions are interpreted by the media and public as simple guesswork."

"My students have described this process of testing ideas in science as: “Hit it with a sledgehammer and see if it breaks. Whatever survives is the best we've got." Science is a very adversarial activity! Hence the old adage among physicists: Physics is a contact sport."

"As much as we think science is about being right, the actual practice of the stuff is largely focused on being wrong. Why? Because being open to the possibility that you might be wrong is exactly how you get less wrong over time, sort of like saying “I’d better find all the holes in my argument before someone else can." Strangely, the way to make your ideas stronger is to try to break them. Looking for errors in your understanding rather than just trying to find supporting evidence is the best way to improve your ideas."

"Knowing how to combat your own confirmation bias helps remove that huge handicap that we all share—the tendency for our beliefs to drift toward what we want to be true."

"As humans, we reflexively reject arguments that contradict what we would like to be true."

"In any disagreement between what we want to be true and what is true, physical reality wins every time."

"Even depressions end. Climate chaos may not."

"Try to keep in mind one of the fundamental aspects of science: letting the evidence form belief rather than belief select evidence."

"New breakthrough technologies can make it easier, but we've already got, right now, everything we need to accomplish the task of transforming our energy economy away from fossil fuels. Except the willingness."

"Doing something controversial was never my intention. This was just my sense of humor, and the kind of humor in my family. I never drew anything my mom wouldn’t have laughed at. Of course, my mom was insane. I’m kidding! Well, maybe a little."

"My own benchmark for success was pretty basic — I just wanted to be able to pay my rent. Beyond reaching that goal I really didn’t care much. I was doing something I loved, getting by, and that’s what mattered. So, in my own eyes, I think I became successful somewhere in my second year. But I’m not sure I ever quite shook the sense that the whole thing might be a house of cards. I always felt like yesterday’s cartoon was yesterday’s cartoon, and I was only as funny as today’s."

"The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors."

"I don't want to turn back the hands of time to when women shuttled across state lines in the thick of night to resolve an unwanted pregnancy, in a cheap hotel room."

"I'm baffled by the way all three buildings came down. My first reaction was that buildings don't fall down like that."

"We come together to mourn the lives lost to the same racist system that devalues Black lives and devalued the lives of Anthony and JoJo."

"Millennium Pipeline-the company behind the compressor-found itself up against not just a bunch of angry, local farmers but also a whole lot of angry New York City hipsters, celebrity chefs, and movie stars like Mark Ruffalo, calling not just for an end to fracking but for the state to shift to 100 percent renewables."

"If we don't act now, we are going to lose our sharks - and our oceans - our life support systems on this planet. Everyone needs to be aware of this situation - and everyone needs to join the fight. We can save our sharks by coming together in a grass roots movement and turning our passion into action. We tend to protect the things we understand, and sharks are largely out of sight, out of mind for us. I hope more people will get in the water - that's a powerful tool to protect them - and everything else in the oceans. When you come virtually face to fin with the "world's most dangerous sharks" you will realize as I have, that sharks aren't the enemies - the only thing we have to fear is ourselves."

"It’s a shame everyone is so afraid of sharks but we love our monsters."

"We need to change environmental policy. We need to have scientists who are working on massive data and research projects. All of those need to happen in parallel with your everyday citizen doing their part. That’s what I mean, is that for those people who find it overwhelming to look at environmental issues on a global scale, we need to scale it down and make it tangible. There needs to continue to be these other processes happening; people working on climate change, people working on environmental law, people working on ecosystem protection, the creation of marine parks. Whatever it is that has a greater impact. For the everyday person, just start, please. Start something."

"I can understand that people get overwhelmed very quickly when you start to talk about an enormous issue like climate change. But I suggest they just choose one change and implement that in their lives, such as deciding not to eat bluefin tuna or shrimp anymore because it’s unsustainable. Then when that becomes simply part of your life, chose something else to implement. Make informed choices and make them part of your everyday life and don’t assume others are doing it for you."

"Whenever I look at any environmental story, whether it’s oceans, jungles, Antarctica, or the Amazon, I look at the human side to translate it in a relevant way for human beings. It makes it more relevant and compelling to people who are watching, listening, reading."

"“I don't suffer the same things that they do, but I stand with them to defend and protect [their lives and homeland]"

"There is no level playing field. Any time our society says that a powerful chemical company has the same right as a low income family that’s living next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair."

"It was very clear that people who were making decisions — county commissioners or industrial boards or city councils — were not the same people who were “hosting” these facilities in their communities. Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table."

"Most Americans do not live in a flood plain. Most Americans don’t live where a highway might have torn through and disrupted their lives. Most American kids don’t go to a school across from a chemical plant, but there are many communities where that is a reality."

"The course for justice is not a sprint. It’s more like a marathon or a relay race. You pass the baton to the next generation, and you hope there’s a smooth pass off. At the same time, you don’t leave that next generation to run the race by itself."

"America is segregated, and so is pollution."

"Redlining steals health and wealth. It was bad for America in the 1920s, and its continuing effects are harmful in the 2020s today."

"we look at which communities are actually at greatest risk from disasters and floods like this, historically, it’s been low-income communities and communities of color, communities that live in low-lying areas that are areas that are very prone to flooding. And it’s very difficult to get insurance, not just flood insurance, but regular insurance, because of redlining. So, what (Hurricane) Harvey has done is to expose those inequalities that existed before the storm."

"disasters like this widen and exacerbate inequality. And so, the communities that are most at risk from not having, you know, the kinds of infrastructure in those areas, in terms of flood protection, in terms of trying to get out, in terms of transportation, etc., I mean, it played out"

"not only will they get washed out in terms of their homes, they’ll get washed out in terms of their income."

"Invisible Houston, that I wrote 30 years ago, there’s a huge population that is still invisible. Houston’s demographics, you know, a lot of people like to say we are one of the most diverse, ethnically and racially, cities in the country. We’re the fourth-largest city in the country. We are racially and ethnically diverse. But when it comes to economics and when it comes to power and decision-making, it stops."

"we have to have strong community-based organizations on the ground with the capacity to assist and support families and households that can get things right, that can pressure and apply the points of saying, “Well, we need to make sure that just because you don’t have a car, just because you don’t have a big bank account doesn’t mean that you should not be safe, that your community should not come back and that you should not have the same level of protection and the same level of importance as if you were a middle-class white neighborhood.” That is—that’s what we have to ensure."

"Houston is very segregated along racial and economic lines. And this flood has really shown that. If you look at ZIP codes, you can map where that vulnerability is. You can also map how resources have been allocated and distributed over the last 50 years."

"those populations that lived, for example, on those fencelines with those chemical companies, people say, “Well, what’s happening at the chemical company that burnt and exploded? They say it’s safe. The chemical company says it’s safe. The EPA says it’s safe. But I’d like to know: Where does the CEO of that company live? If it’s so safe—you know what I’m saying?—how about him pack up and camp out next door?” The problem is, individuals making decisions oftentimes don’t have to deal with the kinds of issues that fenceline communities have to deal with, even when we’re not talking about flooding. We’re talking about the flooding of pollution and chemicals on communities. And people don’t ask for—to be polluted. It’s without their consent."

"We have to talk about environmental racism and call it out when it exists. We can’t just run from it"

"the whole idea of rebuilding, needs to be democratized. Those communities, people need to decide what it is that they want and what they can live with."

"I started—my first job out of graduate school in 1976 was at Texas Southern University in 1976. I was a young, untenured professor in sociology in 1976. And two years out of graduate school, I was asked to collect data for a lawsuit, by my wife, who had filed a lawsuit suing the city of Houston, Harris County and the state of Texas. And I worked for a state university, so my wife actually sued my employer. And so I had 10 students in my graduate class. We collected data for a lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation. That was the first lawsuit in the country that was challenging environmental discrimination using a civil rights law. And it was basically challenging the location of a municipal landfill that was being proposed in a black, middle-class, suburban neighborhood in Houston. Nothing out in that northeast Houston neighborhood except trees, houses and black people—not a likely place for a landfill. And I collected data for that lawsuit, and we wrote studies. And that’s how I, you know, started working on this. And five out of five of the city-owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Six out of eight of the city-owed incinerators were located in black neighborhoods. And three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Eighty-two percent of all the waste garbage dumped in Houston, from 1930s up 'til 1978, were dumped in black neighborhoods. And blacks only made up 25 percent of the population. For me, that was eye-opening. That's what sent me on my way."

"when you talk about all of the potential health threats and the potential damage not just damage to property and the tax base in terms of people’s houses, lowering the property values, but you’re also talking about schools and playgrounds that are located so close, you would say, “Who would do this?” And the idea of environmental justice and environmental racism and the fact that communities of color are disproportionately impacted by these things, not just in Houston, but that’s a national trend—and what we say—people are saying no. Communities have a right to say no, and they have a right to equal protection under the law, and they have a right not to have their children go to school or play on playgrounds that’s not impacted by pollution."

"we have environmental segregation, we have what I call “outdoor apartheid.” This is basically that those areas, those geographic and spacial neighborhoods, that somehow are considered compatible with these types of facilities. And we know that the impacts of living close to, with these emissions or with explosion or accidents or releases that may come from flooding, like Harvey—I mean, we know which communities are impacted. And that’s the justice question."

"what you’re seeing in that kind of analysis is basically certain neighborhoods are unofficially zoned for it, even though we don’t have zoning, unofficially zoned for the things that other people don’t want."

"The communities that have been suffering for all of these years really don’t have a voice. They are still invisible, and they are still underprotected. And as I said before, the most vulnerable population that we’re talking about is children. And if people don’t get angry or somehow concerned about children going to school or playing on playgrounds that’s on the fenceline with companies that’s pumping out dangerous chemicals and creating lots of environmental hazards—you know, you have to understand what kind of person would somehow just turn the other way, or governmental entity that would turn the other way, and say, “Oh, it’s about regulation. We need fewer regulations. And because the companies have to be competitive globally, and therefore the community that’s on the fenceline basically is a sacrifice zone.” And what we say in the environmental justice community, we say no to our communities being sacrifice zones."

"what we’re saying is that our communities, communities of color, want to be sustainable, want to be resilient. They want to be healthy and livable. And it should not somehow be something that’s relegated to white middle-class suburban or urban core."

"The gentrification that oftentimes occurs in many of our communities, it occurs at the—I guess, the detriment of communities that have historically lived in those areas...we have to say that we want to make sure that we redevelop and we develop our communities in a way that minimizes displacement of incumbent residents, and also ensure that those residents who want to remain in those older neighborhoods that are undergoing transformation, that they can. And those who want to leave, by choice, can leave."

"billions come flowing in (after a disaster), and then you have all kinds of organizations and individuals parachuting in, raking up the money, I mean, when the local groups that have been working on these issues for years and years and years somehow get bypassed, get left behind."

"community organizations, institutions, that have been doing this work in the city for many, many years, they need to be funded. They need to have—they need capacity to staff up and to start doing the kind of work, because they have the trust and because they have the experience and because they are here, they are local."

"we will have more hurricanes. We will have more floods. But the thing is, how do we—how do we build, rebuild in a way that will make our city more resilient?"

"I saw that 100 percent of all the city-owned landfills in Houston were in black neighborhoods, though blacks made up only 25 percent of the population. Three out of four of the privately owned landfills were located in predominantly black neighborhoods, and six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators. In a city that does not have zoning, it meant that these were decisions made by individuals in government."

"It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral."

"This whole question of environment, economics, and equity is a three-legged stool. If the third leg of that stool is dealt with as an afterthought, that stool won’t stand. The equity components have to be given equal weight. But racial and economic and social equity can be very painful topics: people get uncomfortable when questions of poor people and race are raised."

"The environmental protection apparatus is broken and must be fixed. The environmental justice movement has set out a clear goal: to fix this protection apparatus by eliminating unequal enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and public health laws."

"Waiting for government to act is recipe for disaster."

"No community, rich or poor, urban or suburban, black or white, should be made into a sacrifice zone or dumping ground."

"Poor people and poor communities are given a false choice between having, on the one hand, no jobs and no development and, on the other hand, risky low-paying jobs and pollution. In reality, unemployment and poverty are also hazardous to one's health. This jobs-versus-unemployment scenario is a form of economic blackmail."

"The (environmental justice) movement has come a long way since its humble beginnings in Warren County, North Carolina, a rural and mostly African American community, where a proposed landfill for disposing of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) ignited protests that resulted in more than five hundred arrests. These protests prompted a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. This study revealed that three of the four off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Region 4 (composed of eight southern states) happen to be located in predominantly African American communities, although African Americans made up only 20 percent of the region's population. The protesters of Warren County put the term "environmental racism" on the map."

"Students and young people have fueled every social movement in the United States, including the civil rights, environmental, antiwar, women's movements."

"In 1990, my book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality chronicled the convergence of two social movements-the social justice and environmental movements-into one, the environmental justice movement. This book highlighted African Americans' environmental activism in the South, the same region that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. What started out as local and often isolated community-based struggles against the siting of toxic waste and industrial facilities blossomed into a multi-issue, multiethnic, and multiregional movement.""

"The 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was probably the single most important event in the environmental justice movement's history. The summit broadened the movement beyond its early focus against toxics to include issues of public health, worker safety, land use, transportation, housing, resource allocation, and community empowerment. The meeting also demonstrated that it is possible to build a multiracial grassroots movement around environmental and economic justice."

"The environmental justice framework shifts the burden of proof to polluters and dischargers who do harm, who discriminate, or who do not give equal protection to racial and ethnic minorities. Under the current system, individuals who challenge polluters must prove that they have been harmed, discriminated against, or disproportionately affected. Few affected communities have the resources to hire the lawyers, expert witnesses, and doctors needed to sustain such a challenge."

"With its bottom-up approach, this movement has re-defined the term "environment" to include the places where people live, work, play, and go to school, as well as brought attention to how these things interact with the physical and natural world."

"Where did this term (Environmental Racism) come from? In 1979, the Northeast Community Action Group (NECAG), a group of Black suburban homeowners in a middle-class enclave in Houston, came together to prevent the city from building a landfill near their neighborhood. The group launched a civil rights suit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., under the legal direction of Linda McKeever Bullard. A report produced in 1979 in support of the lawsuit found that for decades, Houston had built over 80 percent of its landfills and incinerators in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Bullard's husband, Dr. Robert Bullard, began documenting eco-racism cases throughout the city, then throughout the South, and eventually throughout the nation. Their collective actions became a breakthrough moment for fighting environmental decisions as violations of civil rights...As Dr. Bullard points out, inequities sometimes occur as a matter of class, and thus may be directly targeted at white neighborhoods. "Now all of the issues of environmental racism and environmental justice don't just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to say 'no," he stated in an Earth First! interview."

"academics continue to play a crucial supporting role through such institutions as the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark-Atlanta University, founded and run by Robert Bullard, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Orleans, run by Beverly Hendrix Wright. These centers, and others like them, provide crucial research that aids local struggles, as well as train a new generation of professionals of color."

"what spurred and motivated a lot of people to very good organizing, starting with Bob Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie exposé of how environmental racism was encountered with impunity by these big corporations throwing lead, and you name it, various carcinogens into people’s water tables and so on and so forth."

"Hazel M. Johnson's work helped lay the groundwork for climate justice around the world, as well as for an intersectional approach to environmentalism...Another pivotal voice in environmental justice history is its "father," as he's often dubbed, Dr. Robert Bullard... In 1979, Dr. Bullard wrote "Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community," one of the first studies to demonstrate the link between toxic waste locations and race...In his own words, environmental justice can be defined as a concept that "embraces the principles that all communities, all people, are entitled to equal protection of our environmental laws, health laws, housing laws, transportation laws, and civil rights laws.""

"My obsession with cars is based on my obsession with the environment. Food, housing and transportation are the three big human and environmental issues. That's where most of our resources go and where most of our pollution is generated...Transportation is the big elephant in the bedroom that no one wants to seriously discuss."

"Cars are environmental enemy number one."

"After I did the book CARtoons in 2001, I got invitations to speak at various venues including The Village Building Convergence, bookstores and a few universities. Being a visual artist, I gradually developed a slide talk about the social, environmental, economic and political problems of transportation design in America. I used a mixture of cartoons, photographs and maps because I found it was helpful to give people real-world examples of good and bad urban design. When I got positive feedback from the talk, I became interested in turning it into a book and an interactive website. I still have to build the interactive website but Microcosm helped me create, edit and publish the book. My goal was to explain transportation design issues and politics in a simple way to college students and the general public, as well as put forward a few ideas about why I believe we’re not making more political progress at reforming our transportation system."

"When I graduated from college, I sought out the cheapest rooms or apartments I could find. One of these put me next to a freeway interchange in Oakland California. The experience of living there, biking everywhere and reading the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, changed my life and made me appreciate all the issues associated with transportation. I saw exactly how and why the freeway interchange gutted my neighborhood and how the main obstacle and danger to bicycling in urban areas was cars and drivers. This was the early 1990s when many people were waking up to these same issues. I participated in some of the first Critical Mass rides in San Francisco and the East Bay and started giving them my transportation cartoons for flyers and posters. I also discovered the (now defunct) “Auto-Free Times” and Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in Arcata, California and started sending them cartoons as well. By 1994 it had become a major theme in my work."

"What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff? You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies. In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders."

"The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the most inspirational book I've ever read on the subject of transportation and urban planning …but I lived in New York City and knew many of the places and people he was talking about. I'm not sure if it would be as inspirational to others. The book won a Pulitzer Prize when it came out in the 1970s. Caro was a newspaper reporter who wanted to write a book about political power– how it was obtained and wielded and what role agencies played in government. In describing the life of Robert Moses, a highway builder, unelected state bureaucrat and creator of the modern “highway department,” Caro was able to describe (in a microcosm) the transportation and political history of America. Another great book is Ivan Illich's “Energy and Equity.”"

"What are your main inspirations when drawing? The news, nature, other people, day-to-day events, music, sounds, art, everything is potentially inspirational. All you have to do is go outside, read a newspaper or watch contemporary television or movies. The cartoons write themselves!"

"For me, politics are a fundamental element of being human. They are the process by which we collectively interact with each other, resolve conflicts and try to solve larger social or environmental problems. There are family politics, neighborhood politics, local politics, national politics and international politics. Humans are political animals and I find those interactions interesting, amusing and important."

"What are your feelings from Bush to Obama? Besides being responsible for the death of half a million people, I feel like Bush dealt a huge economic and social blow to the USA, one from which we may never fully recover. He directly flushed 3 trillion dollars down the toilet on hopeless, pointlessly destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq …and they’re not even over! For years to come, we’ll be paying costs for all the injured veterans (over 50,000) and destabilizing three countries, because you have to look at the impact that the Afghan war has on Pakistan. Bush expanded the use of torture, and created a whole new layer of government bureaucracy (the “Department of Homeland Security”) to spy on Americans. He created Indefinite Detention (at Guantanamo and other US military bases) and expanded the use of executive-ordered assassinations using the new drone technology. On economic issues, his administration allowed corporations to run things and regulate themselves. The agency that was supposed to regulate oil drilling had lobbyist-paid prostitutes sleeping with employees while oil industry lobbyists basically ran the agency. Energy companies like Enron, and the country’s investment banks were deregulated at the end of the Clinton administration and Bush allowed them to run wild. Above all, he was incompetent and appointed some really stupid people to important positions at every level of government. Certainly, Obama has been involved in many of these same activities. A few he’s increased, such as the use of drone assassinations, but most of them he has at least tried to scale back. At the beginning of his first term, he tried to close the Guantanamo prison and have trials for many of the detainees in the United States but conservatives (including many Democrats) stirred up public resistance and blocked this from happening. He tried to get some kind of universal healthcare because over 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance. This is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcies and foreclosures because someone gets sick in a family, loses their job, loses their health insurance (because American employers are source of most people’s healthcare) and they can’t pay their health bills or their mortgage. Or they use up all their money caring for a sick family member. So many people in the US wanted health insurance reform or single-payer, universal health care similar to what you have in the UK. Members of Obama’s own party (The Democrats) joined with Republicans to narrowly block “The public option” but they managed to pass a half-assed but not-unsubstantial reform of health insurance that would prevent insurers from denying you coverage when you’re sick or have a “preexisting condition.” The minute it was signed into law, Republicans sued in the courts (all the way to the supreme court) and fought, tooth and nail to block its implementation. Same thing with gun control, even as we’re one of the most violent industrial countries in the world. (Among industrial countries, our murder rate is second only to Russia). Obama has managed to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan over Republican opposition but, literally, everything he tries to do, they blast it in the media and fight it in Congress. So, while I have a lot of criticisms of Obama, he is many orders of magnitude less awful than Bush and many of the positive things he’s tried to do have been blocked. That said, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on more things than they disagree. Both signed off on the Afghan and Iraq wars. Both signed off on deregulation of banks, of derivatives, of mortgage regulations and of the energy and telecom business …and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since. I’m guessing it’s the same thing with Labor and Conservatives in the UK. Labor or Democrats will SAY they stand for certain “progressive” things but they end up supporting the same old crap— neo-colonialism or outright imperialism in foreign policy, deregulation, privatization, etc. Blair signed off on Bush’s Iraq war …just like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and many “liberal” U.S. politicians. And only one member of congress (Barbara Lee of California) even questioned the war in Afghanistan—one congressperson out of over 500!"

"Basically, in America both political parties support policies that are taking the entire planet to hell but the Democratic Party is the slow train to hell, whereas the Republicans are the fast train to hell. Because I’m in no hurry to go to hell, I tend to vote Democrat (or Green)."

"Many people believe that America's addiction to automobiles is a cultural problem. The thinking is, if engineers, elected officials and the public were better educated about transportation issues, they'd shift the country away from cars and towards public transit and better land use. In reality, our country's automobile addiction has more to do with politics, government agencies, and our tax structure."

"I am an advocate for car-free cities, car-free city sections and car-free living."

"Like the science fiction movie The Matrix, giving up your car unplugs you from the Matrix of American car culture. From birth, you are unconsciously lured into the car and lured into seeing the world from the viewpoint of a car windshield. Fortunately for me, my father liked bicycles and trains."

"Cars are romanticized on television, in films and in popular music. There are thousands of songs, TV shows, and movies about driving, racing, road trips, and car chases. Just because something is romanticized, however, doesn't mean it's good for you. Alcohol, guns, drugs, and cigarettes are also romanticized in popular culture. But, like cars, they can be bad for your health or even deadly."

"Space formerly devoted to human beings is now devoted to cars."

"Whenever I look at a highway or parking lot, I consider what formerly existed on the land it now occupies and what could exist."

"Not having a car makes you come up with creative solutions and enables to see and overcome the influence of car culture on your own life. When my wife and I got married, we had to figure out how to get from the ceremony to the reception and decided to ride bicycles. It was fun but it also made me appreciate how the wedding and funeral industries have managed to make automobile processions a part of our sacred rituals."

"This may seem obvious but it's important to realize all the ways our society consciously or unconsciously pressures us to travel. There are advertisements for vacations and travel destinations, pressure to work at places only accessible by car, pressure to purchase larger homes outside of town, and pressure to visit family or friends as frequently as possible. Travel is often presented as a way to make us happier, more relaxed and less lonely. In reality, all this traveling often makes us more stressed out, tired, and isolated."

"Many politicians perpetuate car-oriented transportation planning and land use, not out of malice but because they have no idea what it's like to traverse their city without a car. They often don't realize how much of a barrier a highway or big boulevard poses to pedestrians and how this might be hurting businesses or negatively impacting their city. Taking them on walking, biking, or transit tours of their city or getting them to bike or walk to work can make them see the need for transit or pedestrian improvements."

"At some point, however, you must participate in the political process. There is no substitute for making major legislative changes. Meetings are no fun, but political power goes to those who are willing to sit through meetings. Your local zoning boards, community councils, and metropolitan planning organizations can have a big impact on urban design and transportation choices. I encourage people to pay attention to these organizations and become active on transportation issues."

"I believe that creating one large car-free section of an American city would be a powerful example of what's possible. It would prove to people that it could be done and would show how eliminating cars could improve quality of life, improve the environment, and reduce American dependence on foreign oil."

"There are too many damn cars. I first recognized this in 1983, just after high school. A friend and I were unable to buy tickets for a rock concert on Long Island, New York, and had to sit outside the Nassau Coliseum for three hours, waiting for a ride home. Looking out, I saw seemingly endless parking lots surrounded by endless highways, streets and exit ramps, all of them filled with cars-thousands and thousands of cars. Amidst all this concrete, I couldn't see a single tree, a single bush or even a single blade of grass. Once I became sensitized to cars, I realized that almost everything in North America is centered around the automobile. This is true of architecture, urban planning, socializing and even the basic procurement of goods and services. We have become a society in which the simplest human gatherings, like going to hear music or see a sporting event, require thousands of motor vehicles and miles of asphalt. There are precious few places where you are not within sight or sound of a road."

"Images of cars and highways fill our literature, songs, movies and art, not just in America but worldwide. Books like "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac or "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe were among the first to romanticize driving and road trips. Old blues and early rock songs like "Route 66," "Brand New Cadillac," and "Goin' Mobile" further romanticized cars and highways for the postwar "Baby Boom" generation. Thousands of films and T.V. shows have focused on or predominantly featured cars and car chases: "Rebel Without a Cause," "American Graffiti," "Easy Rider," "Bullet," "The Dukes of Hazzard," the "James Bond" films, and at least half a dozen Burt Reynolds movies. The list goes on... All this pop culture, combined with relentless commercial advertising, has made cars an integral part of our personal identity. We have been taught to equate motor vehicles with wealth, power, romance, rebellion and freedom. Now, everywhere I go in the world, I see cars-millions and millions of cars-in Rome, Guatemala City, Kuala Lumpur, Bombay and Beijing. Everywhere there are huge traffic jams and poor air quality. The number of motor vehicles in the world is growing three times faster than the population."

"In contrast to the romantic images of advertising and pop culture, increased "automobility" has meant a loss of community, causing further distancing of social groups and alienation."

"We have created a mechanized concrete environment that is increasingly unfriendly and hazardous to human beings. As we spend more and more time trapped behind the wheels of our cars, as ever more land is bulldozed and made into strip malls and parking lots, the experts tell us our "standard of living" is increasing dramatically. But what about our quality of life?"

"While many debate the quality of life issues, one thing is certain: from an environmental point of view, cars are decimating the planet."

"you can debate whether cars improve or degrade our quality of life, but there is no debating this fact: If we don't stop building new cars and roads, our environment, and we who depend on it for life, are done for."

"By living near your job or working near your home, you can save hundreds of hours of driving each year, giving yourself more free time to do other things (like draw cartoons). From having to walk or bike a little more, you stay in better shape and learn to be more efficient with your trips away from the house."

"by using public transit, you become a better advocate for it since you know more exactly how it works and how it could be improved."

"Zoning has a tremendous impact on transit."

"Major efforts should be made to make cities more livable…More city streets should be made car-free and, where possible, private cars should be banned from city centers entirely."

"Today, companies in the Climate Leadership Council—BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips—are going into the Global South to provide resources to these communities so that they can engage in sequestration. To me, that's green colonialism. You basically have these companies that are responsible for creating the conditions the Global South is enduring now benefiting from this."

"Another example of green colonialism is what happens to a community when you have invested in environmental amenities, like doubling the amount of open space, expanding the median on Fourth Avenue, reducing emissions—doing all the things to make the community more environmentally sound. All of a sudden the community can't afford to live here anymore. The people that benefit are not [from] our community."

"Women's History Month, for me, is like Black History Month in the sense that it's every day. It's not just a month, but it's a life. And it makes me think about my maternal ancestors. It makes me think about all the women who mentored me on my journey to the work that I'm doing and played such a major part in my development, my political understanding, and my cultural grounding. It makes me think about all of them, and I hope that everything that I do honors them."

"We're the descendants of enslavement and colonization, we are people who come from people who've always honored Mother Earth. This climate justice work is just an extension of us honoring those traditions."

"We try really hard to not only make sure that we're centered on the matriarchal, but that we are willing to engage in self-transformation. To be introspective and to challenge each other and ourselves; to be not only accountable to each other but to be tender and kind. That may sound like the soft stuff, but that's hard stuff when you think about how colonized we've been and what our education has prepared us to be."

"When I first came into the environmental justice movement, it felt very patriarchal. And it felt patriarchal coming from women, too, where it was competitive and everybody was sort of jousting to be at the front of the room and get all the shine. It doesn't feel the same in the climate justice space. Everyone shares shine. Everybody shares leadership."

"New York City is like the bastion of capitalism and patriarchy."

"It's really important that the movement be intergenerational."

"The conventional, dated, old ways of thinking will not be able to address the challenges of climate change."

"When I was little, my hero was Lolita Lebrón. And then growing up, Antonia Pantoja, Iris Morales, Esmeralda Simmons, Marta Moreno Vega, Esperanza Martell… These are all women who, from the time I was in my late teens through now, mentored me and guided me—who would pull my coat, who would give me a different perspective. I try to be to another generation of women what they were to me. Through storytelling, they would sit down with me and walk me through all kinds of scenarios so that I would be able to anchor myself culturally and politically. And I will always be in deep gratitude for them because they were my education. They were so necessary for my political development—and also for my fearlessness. I would add my mom to that. They did that for me as a young woman. Lolita Lebron was a fighter for independence of Puerto Rico. I, as a little girl, wanted to be able to lead a revolution for freedom in Puerto Rico. Little kids have different dreams, but when I was eight-years old, I'm watching the Young Lords on TV, and I'm hearing about Lolita Lebrón, and I was like That's who I want to be. Antonia Pantoja passed away. She was the creator of a lot of our institutions. Marta Moreno Vega founded a bunch of institutions. Iris Morales was a Young Lord. Esperanza Martell is a healer and a shaman in our community."

"I think that people sometimes think of mentoring as something that older women do for younger women. They don't realize that we really do learn from each other across generations. There are times when I'm in a space with someone who's 19 years old or much younger than me, and I'm listening and learning and changing. I've changed the way that I communicate. I've changed the way that I think about gender. I've changed the way that I think about so many things because younger people have taught me."

"Young people come with hope and with a renewed vision of a future that transforms."

"We won't have power if we don't have intergenerational power. That's not just rhetoric. We can solve problems when we're together."

"AOC embodies the kind of leadership we dream of: brilliant, courageous, and gifted, with a quick mind and an understanding of our history and the political moment from which she emerged. And most importantly to me, she believes in environmental justice."

"I didn't come to this work with a degree in environmental policy. It happened organically: as a child, my family was displaced so often that I went to eight schools in five years. I remember walking past the burning embers on Simpson Street in the South Bronx. I had no idea then that we were living in the midst of brownfields, contaminated lots with lead, asbestos, PCBs, arsenic, and other toxics and toxicants that seeped through our walls as fugitive dust and landed in our developing lungs. Families like mine all over New York City were the targets of government and developer-driven-planned shrinkage public policies created to deny our communities basic services in order to encourage our departure. The New York City environmental justice movement was born and raised in the midst of this rubble."

"Climate change is unlike any other threat in our history. It will test us in unimaginable ways. It demands leadership that celebrates difference, sees the frontline as partners in decision-making, and is willing to exercise courage for all of us."

"Elizabeth Yeampierre helped welcome and support many of her fellow Puerto Ricans when they arrived in the United States. But when I spoke with her on the island, she said that her "biggest fear" is that the evacuation will be a prelude to a massive land grab. "What they want is our land, and they just don't want our people in it.""

"Elizabeth Yeampierre, who attended the Mariana summit, believes that despite all the devastation being visited on Puerto Rico, her people have the fortitude for the battles ahead. "I see a level of resistance and support that I didn't imagine was going to be possible," she said. "And it reminds me that these are the descendants of colonization and slavery, and they are strong.""

"I grew up in a predominantly Black and Latine community where gang violence was common. My parents grew up in El Salvador, and when they took me to visit, I was struck by the level of poverty I saw. I saw that no matter where in the world my people go, they're exposed to varying levels of injustice. And I knew I had to do something about it, so I decided to write."

"For me, seeing energy and organizing from young people is incredibly motivating. I grew up feeling ambivalent to the world. I knew things were wrong, but I saw no way to change it beyond writing and reporting. The next generation can't afford such feelings of defeat. They're tackling the climate crisis from all angles, and it's so inspiring."

"For a long time, environmental justice was kept separate from the environment at large. It's become "mainstream" only recently, so it just wasn't something the general public–including reporters—really knew about. We see that slowly changing, and we're seeing more environmental reporters become more sophisticated in their understanding of environmental issues and how they impact communities of color. I pursued this because I was, first, interested in racial justice. I knew I wanted to be a reporter that uncovered societal harms right away, but it was only when I realized the severity of the climate crisis that I bridged those two interests together. Once I found out what "environmental justice" was, it was a wrap. I knew that was the beat for me. And it was clear to me that there weren't enough reporters out there covering it."

"Climate justice is racial justice. The climate crisis has always been an issue embedded in systemic racism. Where can we find fossil fuel infrastructure? In communities of color. All the pollutants and toxins those refineries and power plants emit harm the Black and brown communities nearby. Black people, in particular, have borne an unfair burden from the drivers of climate change. Changing this isn't simple. It's not something we can just snap our fingers, and it'll be gone. Solving this will require a complete transformation of social policies. All that money cities and counties spend on their police departments? They can invest it in Black communities to build public transit infrastructure, bike lanes, clean energy projects. That'll take some serious political will. While it's growing, it's not growing nearly fast enough to save the lives of the people climate change is set to harm first and worst."

"My fear is that we won't act quickly enough to leave a habitable world for the youth working so hard to save it. After all, it can't be all on them. They inherited this mess. The adults in the room created it."

"My greatest hope is the youth. They see the issue for what it is. They see it through this racial lens. They understand all the ways it's set to impact their lives, their futures, the world."

"Vote! What we need is systemic change, and that'll only happen if the right people are in office. So vote! Or if you can't vote, contribute to get-out-the-vote campaigns. Phone bank. Post to social media. Call your local representatives. Make change happen on a bigger level than yourself. Definitely do your part, too, but know that's not enough. Not at this point. The situation is too far gone to rely on individuals to clean this up. It's up to world leaders to enact policy that'll end fossil fuels for good and create a just, sustainable world for us all."

"Environmentalists for Black Lives Matter” “Social justice cannot wait,” the caption stated. “It is not an optional ‘add-on’ to environmentalism.” “It is unfair to opt in and out of caring about racial injustices when many of us cannot."

"We should care about the protection of people as much as we care about the protection of our planet-to me, these fights are the same. As a society, we often forget that humans are a part of our global ecosystem and that we don't exist separately from nature; we coexist with it each and every day."

"Unfortunately, as with other animals, some humans are endangered and facing a multitude of social and environmental injustices that impact their ability to not only survive but also thrive in liberation and joy. Why, then, are conservation efforts not extended to the protection of endangered humans and their human rights? This is a question I've struggled with as a Black environmentalist for years, because in my environmental practice, caring for the earth means caring for its people."

"If we combine social justice efforts with environmental awareness efforts, we will harness enough power, representation, and momentum to have a shot at protecting our planet and creating equity at the same time."

"The lack of representation of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, low-income, LGBTQ+, disabled, and other marginalized voices has led to an ineffective form of mainstream environmentalism that doesn't truly stand for the liberation of all people and the planet."

"it's evident that social justice and environmentalism are deeply intertwined and that addressing this interconnection is crucial for attaining justice for both people and planet."

"Social injustice and environmental injustice are fueled by the same flame: the undervaluing, commodification, and exploitation of all forms of life and natural resources, from the smallest blade of grass to those living in poverty and oppressed people worldwide. It's a point that many ecofeminists, environmental justice scholars and leaders, Indigenous rights and land sovereignty advocates, and climate politicians have argued for decades, but it hasn't been embedded deeply enough in modern environmental education."

"I didn't want to be an "environmentalist" if that meant I had to choose between racial progress and environmental progress."

"Those least responsible for the climate crisis are bearing the brunt of it."

"It is time to dismantle and reflect on what environmentalism means and reclaim the term so that it is inclusive of historically excluded and underrepresented people."

"Our identities flow through our politics, our advocacy, what we care about-whether we realize it or not."

"it's truly my biggest hope that one day in the future we won't need to preface "environmentalism" with the word "intersectional"; we won't need to create separate safe spaces and curriculums that seek to be inclusive. One day I hope that when people think of an environmentalist, they'll automatically envision a person who cares very deeply about both people and planet."

"The future can and will be intersectional."

"Hazel M. Johnson's work helped lay the groundwork for climate justice around the world, as well as for an intersectional approach to environmentalism. It's important to also note that she was met with sexism, racism, and classism throughout her career, and has been omitted from many environmental textbooks. As intersectional environmentalists, we are now presented with the opportunity to recreate what environmental education should look like, and we can work together to honor stories like Johnson's to ensure that her legacy, and those of other BIPOC environmentalists, lives on...Another pivotal voice in environmental justice history is its "father," as he's often dubbed, Dr. Robert Bullard."

"What is the impact of having large-scale environmental movements that mostly exclude the voices of the underrepresented and people of color?"

"A mentor of mine once said, "Even the revolution needs accountants." This made me laugh, but it's true! We can each contribute our skills in some way."

"Together, we can transform the future of environmentalism and, with collective action, spread our message across the globe and change enough hearts and minds to positively alter the future."

"Environmentalism was largely a white, middle- and upper-class movement that wasn’t super intersectional. Then after that, in the 80s, we see an emergence of a primarily BIPOC-led environmental justice movement that is trying to address some of the inequity in environmental policy that was really facing Black and brown communities. I think having that context would be really important because the way that it was taught to me was like, ‘there was this environmental movement and it just happened,’ but no kind of nod to the civil rights movement."

"I would say learning is the first step and, honestly, the most fun step. Learning about the history of the environmental justice movement and learning about those cool heroes who deserve to have their place in environmental history. It’s also really important for folks to figure out and get involved with what’s going on in their local communities. You might be surprised, if say, thirty minutes down the highway the air pollution is completely different. Overall, people should look at their local communities, educate themselves, and really have fun with it."

"I had to leave my community in order to have access to the right education, nature, green spaces, clean air. And I think that instilled something in me early on."

"We know it’s going to take all of us and not just a select few."

"I was so frustrated during this second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement [in the Spring of 2020] because the environmental community was largely silent. So I posted the Environmentalists for Black Lives Matter graphic, along with my definition of intersectional environmentalism, and also an intersectional environmentalist pledge and I put it out there."

"If you look at the 1960s and 1970s, there was the civil rights movement, and then there was the environmental movement right after, which was largely white-led. They appropriated the same tactics that they learned from civil rights protestors. And then, of course, we have the first Earth Day, which is super amazing, but if you look at pictures, you see white people wearing headdresses. And now we’re at a different point in history where we have in 2019 and early 2020, the biggest climate marches, and then right after that, side by side, we have another civil rights movement happening at the same time."

"It’s important for people to realize that if they want to use their privilege in the right way, amplify the voices of the people who have historically been unheard."

"I think when a lot of people learn about environmental racism, they think, “How can I save these people?” But they don’t think about “What have I been ignoring to allow this to happen?”"

"It doesn’t matter if you’re living in a city, you’re still in nature. A lot of white environmentalists still view nature as something that they go to, instead of thinking, nature is all around me. And that means that nature is also all around these different communities of colour, even if they’re living in a city."

"I got the term “Intersectional” from Intersectional Feminism*, which is a type of feminism that I identify with. I feel like intersectional feminism shouldn’t have to exist, nor intersectional environmentalism, but because some people in both circles don’t factor in how race and culture can play a significant role in how people are treated or interact with the environment, it needs to be there. For example, people of colour are more likely to live next to toxic waste sites or in areas with higher levels of water and air pollution. I’ve spent the past 6 years in Environmental circles and have been frustrated at times by the lack of acknowledgement of its importance, so I felt like I needed to give words to the type of environmentalism that I practice and would hope all environmentalists adopt."

"I studied Environmental Science and would much rather focus on urgently addressing the climate crisis, but I cannot when I’m fearful for my life and that of those who look like me. I would much rather dedicate my life to fighting against extractive industries than fight for my right to exist in this world. I wish that was just understood as an inherent principle in society."

"For someone who is just getting started, they can start with educating themselves and reading literature about environmental justice and allyship."

"Oprah 100%, I’ve always looked up to her and adore her so much."

"I have spent my life trying to rewrite systems of power, and policy is nothing if not a system for creating and distributing power. That is why, contrary to popular belief, the most important part of a policy proposal is not the details at least not at the beginning. It's the vision that the policy presents and the story it tells. The best policy proposals-that is, the proposals that move the most people to fight for them-present a clear narrative about what went wrong, why it went wrong, and how the government plans to fix it."

"When I asked my mom and grandma why Englewood looked like this, they told me about the government. About how the highway system had been built through Black neighborhoods, destroying communities that would never be rebuilt. About the city's housing authority razing public housing and scattering families in the name of "urban development," only for city officials to turn around and sell the prime real estate to developers on the cheap. About the city systematically underfunding Black schools and then shutting them down because of "underperformance." And that's just what happened to my neighborhood-not even what happened to my family."

"The United States is a nation of scarcity, and increasingly so. Seventy-eight percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. As of 2018, about 40 percent of Americans could not afford an unexpected $400 expense without going into debt or having to sell off their possessions. About 25 percent of Americans skipped necessary medical care because they couldn't afford it. For most people in this country, we are not a nation of prosperity."

"The ability to burn fossil fuels with no limit and no legal repercussions requires two things. First, fossil fuel industries and those who control them (or profit deeply from them) can concentrate enough wealth and political power to override the will of the people-who, by and large, want to stop climate change. Second, there are people and places that can be hurt, even killed, with little consequence."

"Fossil fuel impunity requires intense concentrations of economic and political power among corporations and the wealthy who profit from them."

"The GND resolution proposes to achieve these goals in two ways. The first is through a set of "projects" that, if completed, would nearly eliminate carbon emissions in the US. The second is through a set of policies that aim to protect Americans from the disruption and instability that transitioning away from fossil fuels will create and reduce inequity."

"The Green New Deal is a new policy vision-one that will guide government and society through the biggest task in modern history: decarbonizing our global economy within the next ten to twenty years."

"The Green New Deal is designed, first and foremost, to address the climate crisis at the speed, scale, and scope required to prevent catastrophic levels of warming."

"Only the federal government wields the power to lead a national mobilization that can decarbonize the economy fast enough."

"Every economic mobilization in American history has exploited marginalized people. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)-created during the New Deal to provide loans to homeowners facing foreclosure-often labeled predominantly black neighborhoods as "high risk," which discouraged lending and encouraged redlining. Today, 74 percent of the neighborhoods labeled "high risk" are low- to middle-income neighborhoods, and 64 percent are predominantly minority-meaning that these areas are still racially and economically segregated to this day."

"Highway expansion and urban renewal programs during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s displaced hundreds of thousands of residents-mostly people of color-without adequate financial assistance, erasing decades of wealth for those who owned homes and businesses. Because of this, the thought of an economic mobilization understandably frightens millions of Americans. The Green New Deal must directly address these fears, or risk losing the public support it needs to sustain itself across a decade."

"The GND's vision of power is one of redistribution: from private to public, from employer to worker, from the historically advantaged to the historically disadvantaged."

"the climate crisis can continue unabated only with immense concentrations of economic and political power."

"The success of the Green New Deal depends on the ability to reroute power away from the 1 percent and the political and economic institutions designed to serve them. If we are going to become an economy that serves people and the planet, then the people-all of the people-need power, and we need it now."

"Given the time frame, the climate crisis-vast, existential, worsening by the day-is solvable only through an economy-wide energy transition, which requires an economic mobilization. Only a national coordinated all-out push can ramp up production of clean energy infrastructure fast enough-and ramp down emissions fast enough."

"Critics who doubt our nation's capacity to achieve a transition of the scale and speed the Green New Deal proposes should heed the lessons of the World War II mobilization: set the production targets you need to win, even if they seem impossible at the outset, and then hustle to meet those targets through massive, coordinated, strategic public investment and collaborations with private industry."

"all GND policy, whether narrow or broad, serves a triple bottom line: achieve the decarbonization goals set out by H.R. 109, reduce income inequality, and redress systemic oppression."

"GND policy works to shape markets and create demand so that low-carbon and no-carbon goods become the default, rather than the alternative to carbon-intensive goods."

"The details will keep changing as we learn how best to decarbonize equitably and mobilize the American people-our hands, our creativity, our resources-to remake our economy, while caring for one another every step of the way. But no matter what we encounter in the weeds of policy blueprints and implementation, the vision of the Green New Deal provides the compass we'll need."

"If we avoid the worst and we're able to adapt in a way where we really kind of changed our approach to things like equity and how we deal with the environment. If we do that, and I want my son to know I was a part of it, even just a small part of it, but part of it, and if we don't and we fail, I want him to know that I tried."

"being the only Latina in most of my science classes and certainly not having any Latinos, let alone Latinas to look up to in terms of mentors, kind of put it upon me to do better, to represent my community. So that's tough. So you kind of have to do both. You have to represent your community at the same time. You want to hold your own as a scientist and not feel like you're going to only be doing research that affects your community."

"The research for a long time had showed how Latinos and in general communities of color are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of pollution. But at the time we weren't talking about how those same communities are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change."

"There are some impacts that are already baked into the system that we can't avoid and we need to learn to adapt and adapt in a way that's equitable. But we also need to do everything we can to prevent the worst."

"So ocean acidification for folks that work in, for example, fishing industries, storms for anybody that lives along the coast, sea level rise for folks that live along the coast as well and heat, which is pretty much everybody. So I think to think that anyone is immune to the impacts of climate change is delusional."

"How can we look at our kids and say we're fighting climate change and we're driving SUVs and eating steak every night and soaking up energy. It's hypocritical. We need to kind of walk the walk."

"Reduce the amount of meat that you eat. Think about transportation, how you can reduce the amount of flying that you do. How can you not drive as much as you do? If you're going to buy a house, think about energy efficiency and think about what you really need in terms of house. Do you need a 5,000 square foot house or 15,000 or 1500 be okay?"

"The sea level rise that we’re going to see in the next 15 years is going to transform Florida, it’s going to transform many parts of the world, it’s going to create major problems with flooding and drinking water. We’ve got a lot of science, we know that climate change is happening, we know that it’s human-caused, and we know that we’re starting to see the impacts now. But this information is not being sufficiently reflected in our policies at the state or the federal level."

"The list of places that have the largest and/or the fastest growing Latino populations are also the places that are most vulnerable to sea level rise. And practically speaking there’s a large portion of the Latino population that works outdoors in the environment whether it's agriculture or construction, and so we are more sensitive to environmental changes."

"I also think that because we have more international perspective we’re not as susceptible to the campaign of disinformation that’s being pushed by the polluting companies. These arguments seem to be most upfront in American media. But when you look at international media, whether Telemundo or BBC, they’re presenting the information in a more practical way. They’re talking to scientists, they’re talking to experts, and when you do that, there is not a debate."

"Whether you like it or not, we’re going to have to deal with climate change, and we’re going to have to adapt. A lot of people say, just do what they do in the Netherlands, or New Orleans, build seawalls, but we can’t. We sit on a very porous limestone rock, so when the sea level goes up, it doesn’t just come up over the coast on the beaches, it comes in underground into the acquifer, and we get our drinking water from that acquifer. It raises the water table causing inland flooding and it also contaminates that potable water. Communities are spending millions of dollars moving well fields inland because of salt water intrusion."

"Migration is a huge issue, not just for the Americas, but also for other parts of the world. When we talk about the many impacts of climate change, what they mean, I think a major end result are climate refugees."

"We’re dealing with multiple impacts… wet periods, dry periods, sea level rise, increased temperatues. That’s why there’s such a sense of urgency behind adaptation and mitigation, because the window for us to make decisions on how we’re going to prevent the worst is closing, and if we don’t take action now, then we’re going to be dealing with, in the words of the IPCC, “horrible” consequences."

"My mother used to say a man’s money goes where his heart is, so if that’s the case, the amount of money going to CEQ to support environmental justice [EJ] does not show where their heart is. I believe the heart is there, but the money has to follow."

"On liquefied natural gas, the majority of the places where they want to put liquefied gas facilities are in poor and minority communities. So the same group of people is now being asked to bear the burden of our transition [from fossil fuels]. What kind of transition is that for communities?"

"Any project that moves forward should be inclusive of three things: It will not harm communities. It will not contribute to the climate crisis. And it will not perpetuate racially disproportionate burdens of pollution. Any program that we bring in to solve the problem must have these three principles embedded in it so we don’t make the same mistakes."

"Biden’s approach is unique in that it not only acknowledges the damage that is now and has been done by pollution and the resulting changes in the climate, but his approach attempts to attack the sources of the problem. That includes racism. And Justice40, [a federal initiative to deliver 40 percent of the benefits from federal climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities] is an attempt to ameliorate the existing problem and stamp out or change policies and regulations and laws that perpetuate the continuation of disproportionate pollution burdens for Blacks and other minorities."

"it seems difficult to talk about putting in place a project that deals with racial discrimination when you can’t use race in evaluating it. It’s really insane."

"I don’t think we should talk about reducing greenhouse gases and saving the planet without environmental justice being shoulder to shoulder with that."

"Communities have not been able to recover, to go back home. And gentrification is happening at warp speed in areas where climate change and flooding have caused the displacement of communities. This is a huge problem. Race is at the center of it in terms of fairness. And we have to find a way to make certain that we make up for the harm that’s been done and put things in place so that harm does not continue for racial minorities in this country."

"Any climate bill has to deal with both repairing EJ communities and reducing climate change. The fact of the matter is that they go hand in hand, because one of the reasons that we are the way we are is because of what we’ve done to communities of color across this country — putting fossil fuel industry facilities in our communities, not caring about our health or our lives, that’s why we’re here. We can’t move forward without addressing that."

"After Katrina, trying to get back to the city was awful for Black people and we still haven’t fully recovered."

"The Harvard study comes out and I’m like, ‘OK, now I understand.' Black people are dying because of where we live."

"People of my age group are so angry, Why are we in the same place? We’ve actually lost some of the progress."

"In New Orleans east, we have one supermarket. I went to the supermarket yesterday. I could get no lettuce, you know, no fruit…all the fruit gone. It was just amazing. 70,000 people, one supermarket in New Orleans east. That’s it. And I have to tell you, I’ve not been a big McDonald’s fan, but after Katrina, if it weren’t for McDonald’s we wouldn’t have had anything to eat. It was like people just forgot about us."

"Environmental injustice occurs in a number of ways. The fact that, first of all, when you look at the federal level they never addressed soil contamination that exists all over the city. We have extremely high arsenic levels, and PCBs, cause where we live we use a lot of pesticides; we have a lot of pests. From rat poisoning, to pesticides for roaches and mosquitoes, you already have all of that, right, and then you add to that the big mixture that came in all the water from all over, even from the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, then you add to that human feces and everything from the sewage treatment plants. That water was extremely filthy. And very dangerous. And then it settled. There was a light dust that covered everything when we came back home."

"My thing was, if you’re not going to protect the citizens at least tell them what they need to do to protect themselves. So we started the Safeway Back Home campaign, where people remediated their own properties and planted new grass, and so on."

"My hope is for the future with young people. I would say that young people are not NEARLY as racist as what we used to be. And I think they see a completely different world and I’m so happy that that is the case."

"I think that black people’s concerns about the environment and environmental justice are synonymous. I believe that black people understand the environment because of the injustices that exist in their communities as it relates to their health and exposure. It all merges around the larger concept of civil rights, and so we have combined the idea of environmental protection with civil rights."

"Environmental justice becomes a major point of contention for us in that we have to ask the question: if we were in Boston, for example, in an area that was mostly white, how long would it take for them to clean up that city? We were promised initially that in three months the Army Corps of Engineers would come in. It would take them three months to remove the topsoil and sweep the streets clean so that we can return. Then, all of the sudden, the whole discussion about contaminants completely disappeared, but the contaminants are still here."

"When you looked at the map, the only areas that they were talking about not rebuilding were areas where the African-American population was about 75 to 80 percent. That was New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward."

"There was a lot of discrimination against African-Americans with apartments. You would go there to rent, you’d call, and it was available, and when you got there it wasn’t. And then later you found out there were rental units, but they were not renting to us. They had met their quota of African-Americans."

"Racism holds everybody back. So, while people make the decision that people who work in hotels and restaurants really don’t need a livable wage because they’re black, and we don’t have to pay black people a lot, what they are doing is they are robbing themselves of a decent tax base. They are producing citizens who can’t buy health insurance, putting a drain on the city. And so the racism that drives this belief that you can treat some human beings less than others, in the end catches up with all of us because it lowers the standard of living for everybody. And I think that’s what we have been dealing with in the city of New Orleans."

"history of human slavery spawned environmental racism in the United States."

"A colonial mentality exists in the South, where local governments and big business take advantage of people who are politically and economically powerless. This mentality emerged from the region's earlier marriage to slavery and the plantation system-a brutal system that exploited both humans and the land."

"it is important to recognize that governments seldom initiate action to address environmental problems. Governments generally respond to outside pressure, and this pressure must be applied over an extended period of time to achieve lasting results."

"academics continue to play a crucial supporting role through such institutions as the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark-Atlanta University, founded and run by Robert Bullard, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Orleans, run by Beverly Hendrix Wright. These centers, and others like them, provide crucial research that aids local struggles, as well as train a new generation of professionals of color."

"There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories."

"If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the "Sun" of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love."

"Regenerative economies that reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants. They invite us all into the circle to give our human gifts in return for all we are given. How will we answer?"

"gift economies arise from the abundance of gifts from the Earth, which are owned by no one and therefore shared. Sharing engenders relationships of goodwill and bonds that ensure you will be invited to the feast when your neighbor is fortunate. Security is ensured by nurturing the bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance."

"The guidelines of the Honorable Harvest are not usually written down, they are reinforced in small acts of daily life. But if I were to list them they would look something like this: Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first one. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.: Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever."

"My Anishinaabe people, as well as the Haudenosaunee people who are my neighbours, have adopted the bowl as the symbol for the nurture and provisioning of the land. We have agreements with one another, known as the One Bowl, One Spoon treaties. The land is understood as the Bowl, filled by Mother Earth with everything that we need. It is our responsibility to share it and keep that bowl full. How we take from the bowl is represented by the spoon. There's just one spoon, the same size for everyone, humans and more-than-humans alike. Not a tiny one for some and a gouging shovel for others. One of the oldest 'conservation policies' on the planet is a statement about sharing, about justice, about reciprocity with the gifts of the land."

"The land is a sharp reflection of the worldview of the peoples who care for it, or don't."

"We are all related, woven together in webs of reciprocal connection, where what happens to one happens to all."

"The call for land protection cannot be one of removing Indigenous and local people from land, but of harmonizing people and land, of aligning economies with the laws of nature. Let's remember that ecology and economy share the same root word, oikos, the Greek word for home. Our work is not just to protect the remnants of biodiversity but to restore them with a combination of the tools of environmental science and the philosophy and know-how of Indigenous knowledge. Restoration must also include restoration of an honourable relationship with land, of re-storyation, the adoption of a new narrative for the relationship between people and place. One that asks not 'What more can we take from the Earth' but 'What does the Earth ask of us?'"

"I don't know about hope, but I do know about love. I think we are in this perilous moment because we have not loved the Earth enough, and it is love that will lead us to safety. I'm dreaming of a time when we are propelled not by fear of what is coming towards us, fearsome as it is, but by love for a beautiful vision of a world whole and healed. One of the great gifts of Indigenous environmental philosophy is that it provides that expansive vision of what it means to be a human: it is an invitation to be a member of the sacred web of life, to belong. As we join the oriole in singing thanks to the Earth, we can live in such a way that the Earth will be grateful for us...Let us ask each other, what do you love too much to lose?"

"Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass, loose and flowing, like newly washed hair. Golden green and glossy above, the stems are banded with purple and white where they meet the ground. Hold the bundle up to your nose. Find the fragrance of honeyed vanilla over the scent of river water and black earth and you understand its scientific name: Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten."

"There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait."

"Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness."

"Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us."

"For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it."

"Look at the legacy of poor Eve's exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land."

"In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as "the younger brothers of Creation." We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They've been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out."

"Our lands around were wanted by settlers, so in long lines, surrounded by soldiers, we were marched at gunpoint along what became known as the Trail of Death. They took us to a new place, far from our lakes and forests. But someone wanted that land too, so the bedrolls were packed again, thinner this time. In the span of a single generation my ancestors were "removed" three times—Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. I wonder if they looked back for a last glimpse of the lakes, glimmering like a mirage. Did they touch the trees in remembrance as they became fewer and fewer, until there was only grass? So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother Sha-note, "wind blowing through," was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries could not pronounce were not permitted."

"Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—"poor man's meat.""

"Nut butter: good winter food. High in calories and vitamins—everything you needed to sustain life. After all, that’s the whole point of nuts: to provide the embryo with all that is needed to start a new life."

"The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together."

"The federal government's Indian Removal policies wrenched many Native peoples from our homelands. It separated us from our traditional knowledge and lifeways, the bones of our ancestors, our sustaining plants—but even this did not extinguish identity. So the government tried a new tool, separating children from their families and cultures, sending them far away to school, long enough, they hoped, to make them forget who they were. [...] Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren't looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places. Whether it was their homeland or the new land forced upon them, land held in common gave people strength; it gave them something to fight for. And so—in the eyes of the federal government—that belief was a threat."

"It was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it. [...] Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and green. "Really? For me? Oh, you shouldn't have." After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity. Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answer: eat them."

"A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source."

"Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate."

"In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity."

"The exchange relationships we choose determine whether we share them as a common gift or sell them as a private commodity. A great deal rests on that choice. For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one. One of these stories sustains the living systems on which we depend. One of these stories opens the way to living in gratitude and amazement at the richness and generosity of the world. One of these stories asks us to bestow our own gifts in kind, to celebrate our kinship with the world. We can choose. If all the world is a commodity, how poor we grow. When all the world is a gift in motion, how wealthy we become."

"Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft."

"A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze."

"Our people were canoe people. Until they made us walk. Until our lakeshore lodges were signed away for shanties and dust. Our people were a circle, until we were dispersed. Our people shared a language with which to thank the day, until they made us forget. But we didn’t forget. Not quite."

"Tahawus is the Algonquin name for Mount Marcy, the highest peak in the Adirondacks. It’s called Mount Marcy to commemorate a governor who never set foot on those wild slopes. Tahawus, "the Cloud Splitter," is its true name, invoking its essential nature."

"When we call a place by name it is transformed from wilderness to homeland."

"History moves in a circle."

"The land knows you, even when you are lost."

"A people's story moves along like a canoe caught in the current, being carried closer and closer to where we had begun."

"Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land."

"That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred."

"What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home."

"The world has a way of guiding your steps."

"To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language."

"Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own."

"To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing."

"You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed."

"Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us."

"The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world."

"A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other."

"We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be."

"The maples carried the people through, provided food just when they needed it most."

"There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other."

"I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around."

"I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss."

"All moms have treasured ways to spend the few precious hours they have to themselves, curling up with a book or sewing, but I mostly went to the water, the birds and the wind and the quiet were what I needed."

"Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge."

"We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want."

"' is a safe place, a nursery for fish and insects, a shelter from predators, a safety net for the small beings of the pond. Hydrodictyon— Latin for "the water net." What a curious thing. A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it."

"Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in."

"Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world."

"The sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth."

"Being a good mother doesn't end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn't end until she creates a home where all of life's beings can flourish."

"It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say "Have a great time, sweetie" while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom. It's our job. And I wanted to be a good mother."

"The presence of our reciprocal love is hard to say good-bye to."

"We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us. The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves."

"We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back."

"The sunrise ceremony is our way of sending gratitude into the world, to recognize all that we are given and to offer our choicest thanks in return. Many Native peoples across the world, despite myriad cultural differences, have this in common—we are rooted in cultures of gratitude."

"While expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

"Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That's good medicine for land and people alike."

"Leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom."

"Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream's gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human's education is to know those duties and how to perform them."

"Duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. Eagles were given the gift of far sight, so it is their duty to watch over us. Rain fulfills its duty as it falls, because it was given the gift of sustaining life. What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking "What is our responsibility?" is the same as asking "What is our gift?" It is said that only humans have the capacity for gratitude. This is among our gifts."

"Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream's gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human's education is to know those duties and how to perform them."

"Appreciation begets abundance."

"How do we show our children our love? Each in our own way by a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons."

"I knew it with a certainty as warm and clear as the September sunshine. The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That's what good mothers do."

"This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone."

"The ultimate reciprocity, loving and being loved in return."

"Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond."

"I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts."

"Much of what fills our mouths is taken forcibly from the earth. That form of taking does no honor to the farmer, to the plants, or to the disappearing soil. It’s hard to recognize food that is mummified in plastic, bought and sold, as a gift anymore. Everybody knows you can't buy love. In a garden, food arises from partnership. If I don’t pick rocks and pull weeds, I'm not fulfilling my end of the bargain. I can do these things with my handy opposable thumb and capacity to use tools, to shovel manure. But I can no more create a tomato or embroider a trellis in beans than I can turn lead into gold. That is the plants' responsibility and their gift: animating the inanimate. Now there is a gift."

"A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself."

"Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do."

"Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all."

"The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others."

"The truth of our relationship with the soil is written more clearly on the land than in any book."

"It is an honor to be the guardian of another species—an honor within each person's reach that we too often forget."

"For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me."

"In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows. Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row. Without them, there is no basket of plenty. Only if that first circle is in place can we weave the second. The second reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs. Economy built upon ecology. But with only two rows in place, the basket is still in jeopardy of pulling apart. It’s only when the third row comes that the first two can hold together. Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance. I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row. Whatever the name, the three rows represent recognition that our lives depend on one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future."

"To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen."

"To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask."

"Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings."

"A theory, to scientists, means something rather different from its popular use, which suggests something speculative or untested. A scientific theory is a cohesive body of knowledge, an explanation that is consistent among a range of cases and can allow you to predict what might happen in unknown situations."

"Getting scientists to consider the validity of indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water. They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion."

"We are all the product of our worldviews—even scientists who claim pure objectivity."

"Science and traditional knowledge may ask different questions and speak different languages, but they may converge when both truly listen to the plants."

"Sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gift."

"Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving."

"If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer."

"Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual."

"Being a citizen does mean sharing in the support of your community."

"Most people are indifferent, unless their self-interest is at stake. Then there are the chronic complainers. [...] Fortunately, there are those in every organization, few but invaluable, who know their responsibilities and seem to thrive on meeting them. They get things done. These are the ones we all rely upon, the people who take care of the rest of us, quiet leaders."

"If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing."

"If you ask permission, you have to listen to the answer."

"The need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human."

"We are told to take only that which is given."

"Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever."

"The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are harvested as persons, nonhuman persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit—and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it. When you regard those nonhuman persons as kinfolk, another set of harvesting regulations extends beyond bag limits and legal seasons."

"Imagination is one of our most powerful tools. What we imagine, we can become."

"I’ve heard it said that sometimes, in return for the gifts of the earth, gratitude is enough. It is our uniquely human gift to express thanks, because we have the awareness and the collective memory to remember that the world could well be otherwise, less generous than it is. But I think we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity."

"Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence."

"The teachings tell us that a harvest is made honorable by what you give in return for what you take."

"A harvest is made honorable when it sustains the giver as well as the taker."

"What's good for the land is also good for the people."

"We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don't have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth's beings."

"I don't have much patience with food proselytizers who refuse all but organic, free-range, fair-trade gerbil milk. We each do what we can."

"Wild things should not be for sale."

"We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands."

"It is said that the Creator gathered together the four sacred elements and breathed life into them to give form to Original Man before setting him upon Turtle Island. The last of all beings to be created, First Man was given the name . The Creator called out the name to the four directions so that the others would know who was coming. Nanabozho, part man, part manido—a powerful spiritbeing—is the personification of life forces, the , and our great teacher of how to be human. In Nanabozho's form as Original Man and in our own, we humans are the newest arrivals on earth, the youngsters, just learning to find our way."

"Nanabozho did not know his parentage or his origins—only that he was set down into a fully peopled world of plants and animals, winds, and water. He was an immigrant too. Before he arrived, the world was all here, in balance and harmony, each one fulfilling their purpose in the Creation. He understood, as some did not, that this was not the "," but one that was ancient before he came."

"Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again."

"Wabunong—the East—is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew."

"Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world."

"The South, zhawanong, the land of birth and growth. From the South comes the green that covers the world in spring, carried on the warm winds."

"To be indigenous is to protect life on earth."

"By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place."

"To carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility."

"To become indigenous is to grow the circle of healing to include all of Creation."

"A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it."

"All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation."

"The plants are our oldest teachers."

"Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do."

"The earth is so richly endowed that the least we can do in return is to pay attention."

"The composer Aaron Copland got it right. An n spring is music for dancing. The woods dance with the colors of wildflowers, nodding sprays of white dogwood and the pink froth of redbuds, rushing streams and the embroidered solemnity of dark mountains."

"The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart."

"A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear."

"In some Native languages the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us.""

"In the , the root word for land is the same as the word for mind. Gathering roots holds up a mirror between the map in the earth and the map of our minds. This is what happens, I think, in the silence and the singing and with hands in the earth. At a certain angle of that mirror, the routes converge and we find our way back home."

"Caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack."

"In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart."

"Far out beyond the surf they felt it. Beyond the reach of any canoe, half a sea away, something stirred inside them, an ancient clock of bone and blood that said, "It’s time." Silver-scaled body its own sort of compass needle spinning in the sea, the floating arrow turned toward home. From all directions they came, the sea a funnel of fish, narrowing their path as they gathered closer and closer, until their silver bodies lit up the water, redd-mates sent to sea, prodigal salmon coming home."

"So he walks the path at nightfall with a bundle in his hand. Into a nest of cedar bark and twisted grass he lays the coal and feeds it with his breath. It dances and then subsides. Smoke pools darkly as the grasses melt to black and then erupt into flame, climbing one stem and then another. All around the meadow, others do the same, setting in the grass a crackling ring of fire that quickens and gathers, white smoke curling upward in the fading light, breathing into itself, panting across the slope until its convective gasp sets the night alight. A beacon to bring their brothers home."

"Black against the golden grass and many inches deep into prairie earth, the trail follows the natural contours as if centuries of footfalls have preceded my own. It’s just me, the grass, and the sky, and two bald eagles riding the thermals. Cresting the ridge releases me into an explosion of light and space and wind. My head catches fire at the sight. I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place. Words blow away. Even thought dissipates like wisps of cloud sailing up the headland. There is only being."

"It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart."

"Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life."

"This is what we field biologists live for: the chance to be outside in the vital presence of other species, who are generally way more interesting than we are. We get to sit at their feet and listen."

"Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world."

"Science can be a way of forming intimacy and respect with other species that is rivaled only by the observations of traditional knowledge holders. It can be a path to kinship."

"Mohawk language and culture didn’t disappear on their own. , the government policy to deal with the so-called Indian problem, shipped Mohawk children to the barracks at , where the school's avowed mission was "Kill the Indian to Save the Man." [...] Despite Carlisle, despite exile, despite a siege four hundred years long, there is something, some heart of living stone, that will not surrender. I don't know just what sustained the people, but I believe it was carried in words. Pockets of the language survived among those who stayed rooted to place. Among those remaining, the Thanksgiving Address was spoken to greet the day: "Let us put our minds together as one and send greetings and thanks to our Mother Earth, who sustains our lives with her many gifts." Grateful reciprocity with the world, as solid as a stone, sustained them when all else was stripped away."

"The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and creation that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people."

"Traditional Mohawks speak the words of thanksgiving to the land, but these days the lands along the have little to be grateful for. When parts of the reserve were flooded by power dams, heavy industry moved in to take advantage of the cheap electricity and easy shipping routes. , , and don’t view the world through the prism of the Thanksgiving Address, and became one of the most contaminated communities in the country. The families of fishermen can no longer eat what they catch. Mother's milk at Akwesasne carries a heavy burden of PCBs and dioxin. Industrial pollution made following traditional lifeways unsafe, threatening the bond between people and the land. Industrial toxins were poised to finish what was started at Carlisle."

"When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world."

"A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit."

"Losing a plant can threaten a culture in much the same way as losing a language. [...] The history of the plants is inextricably tied up with the history of the people, with the forces of destruction and creation."

"For grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole."

"When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival."

"Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they’re bringing you something you need to learn."

"To plant trees is an act of faith."

"Old-growth cultures, like , have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people."

"If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are."

"One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another."

"Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story."

"Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop."

"Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people, of how they understand themselves, their place in the world, and the ideals to which they aspire. Likewise, the collective fears and deepest values of a people are also seen in the visage of the monsters they create."

"We are all complicit. We've allowed the "market" to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth."

"It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for. I remember walking a street in Manhattan, where the warm light of a lavish home spilled out over the sidewalk on a man picking through the garbage for his dinner. Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy."

"The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as "quality of life" but eats us from within. It is as if we've been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster."

"Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law. [...] Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct."

"Nine sites line the shore of Onondaga Lake, around which the present-day city of , has grown. Thanks to more than a century of industrial development, the lake known as one of North America's most sacred sites is now known as one of the most polluted lakes in the United States. Drawn by abundant resources and the coming of the , the captains of industry brought their innovations to Onondaga territory. Early journals record that smokestacks made the air "a choking miasma." The manufacturers were happy to have Onondaga Lake so close at hand, to use as a dumping ground. Millions of tons of were slurried onto the lake bottom. The growing city followed suit, adding sewage to the suffering of the waters. It is as if the newcomers to Onondaga Lake had declared war, not on each other, but with the land."

"From across the water, the western shore stands out in sharp relief. Bright white bluffs gleam in the summer sun like the White Cliffs of Dover. But when you approach by water, you’ll see that the cliffs are not rock at all, but sheer walls of Solvay waste. While your boat bobs on the waves, you can see erosion gullies in the wall, the weather conspiring to mix the waste into the lake: summer sun dries out the pasty surface until it blows, and subzero winter temperatures fracture it off in plates that fall to the water. A beach beckons around the point but there are no swimmers, no docks. This bright white expanse is a flat plain of waste that slumped into the water when a retaining wall collapsed many years ago. A white pavement of settled waste extends far out from shore, barely under water. The smooth shelf is punctuated by cobble-sized rocks, ghostly beneath the water, unlike any rock you know. These are s, accretions of , that pepper the lake bottom. Oncolites—tumorous rocks."

"The waste beds continue to leach tons of salt into the lake every year. Before the Allied Chemical Company, successor to Solvay Process, ceased operation, the salinity of Onondaga Lake was ten times the salinity of the headwaters of Nine Mile Creek. The salt, the oncolites, and the waste impede the growth of rooted aquatic plants. Lakes rely on their submerged plants to generate oxygen by photosynthesis. Without plants, the depths of Onondaga Lake are oxygen-poor, and without swaying beds of vegetation, fish, frogs, insects, herons—the whole food chain—are left without habitat. While rooted water plants have a hard time, floating algae flourish in Onondaga Lake. For decades high quantities of nitrogen and phosphorous from municipal sewage fertilized the lake and fueled their growth. Algae blooms cover the surface of the water, then die and sink to the bottom. Their decay depletes what little oxygen is in the water and the lake begins to smell of the dead fish that wash up on shore on hot summer days."

"The fish that survive, you may not eat. Fishing was banned in 1970 due to high concentrations of mercury. It is estimated that one hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds of mercury were discharged into Onondaga Lake between 1946 and 1970. Allied Chemical used the mercury cell process to produce industrial chlorine from the native salt brines. The mercury waste, which we know to be extremely toxic, was handled freely on its way to disposal in the lake. Local people recall that a kid could make good pocket money on "reclaimed" mercury. One old-timer told me that you could go out to the waste beds with a kitchen spoon and pick up the small glistening spheres of mercury that lay on the ground. A kid could fill an old canning jar with mercury and sell it back to the company for the price of a movie ticket. Inputs of mercury were sharply curtailed in the 1970s, but the mercury remains trapped in the sediments where, when methylated, it can circulate through the aquatic food chain. It is estimated that seven million cubic yards of lake sediments are today contaminated with mercury."

"Swimming was banned in 1940. Beautiful Onondaga Lake. People spoke of it with pride. Now they barely speak of it at all, as if it were a family member whose demise was so shameful that the name never comes up."

"When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year. Afterward, every single treaty was broken. Illegal takings of land by the state of New York diminished the aboriginal Onondaga territories to a reservation of only forty-three hundred acres. The Onondaga Nation territory today is not much bigger than the Solvay waste beds. Assaults on Onondaga culture continued. Parents tried to hide their children from Indian agents, but they were taken and sent to boarding schools like . The language that framed the was forbidden. Missionaries were dispatched to the matrilineal communities—in which men and women were equals—to show them the error of their ways. Longhouse ceremonies of thanksgiving, ceremonies meant to keep the world in balance, were banned by law. The people have endured the pain of being bystanders to the degradation of their lands, but they never surrendered their caregiving responsibilities. They have continued the ceremonies that honor the land and their connection to it."

"Generations of grief, generations of loss, but also strength—the people did not surrender. They had spirit on their side. They had their traditional teachings. And they also had the law. Onondaga is a rarity in the United States, a Native nation that has never surrendered its traditional government, never given up its identity nor compromised its status as a sovereign nation. Federal laws were ignored by their own authors, but the Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law."

"Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."

"We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action. The participatory role of people in the well-being of the land has been lost, our reciprocal relations reduced to a Keep Out sign. [...] People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet. So quiet that protection of the environment that enables them to eat and breathe and imagine a future for their children doesn’t even make it onto a list of their top ten concerns. The Haunted Hayride of dumps, the melting glaciers, the litany of doomsday projections—they move anyone who is still listening only to despair. Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth."

"Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things."

"Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way."

"Sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion."

"Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us."

"The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old."

"In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy."

"Ignorance makes it too easy to jump to conclusions about what we don't understand."

"Naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see."

"It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night."

"The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation."

"If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again."

"Our histories are inevitably braided together with our futures."

"In an essay describing peoples with few possessions as the original affluent society, anthropologist reminds us that, "modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples." The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a economy."

"The earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified. Properly managed, the commons approach maintains abundance, not scarcity. These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all. And yet, while creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance."

"The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all."

"There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents."

"it’s really love more than hope…We hear so much of: ‘Well, do you have hope?’ Hope for what? For me it’s about helping people fall in love with the world again. We know as people the power we have when we really recognise our love for someone or something. Hmm! – there’s nothing that’s going to stand in our way. (The Guardian, 2024)"

"I fear altogether too many scientists hide behind this notion that our objectivity will somehow be compromised by advocacy. I couldn’t disagree more…When we have the privilege of understanding how the living world works, who better than the scientific community to also stand up and tell this story? (The Guardian, 2024)"

"the English language is a language of objectification of the living world, right? When we see that beautiful moon, we say “it” is shining; those swallows, “it” is chittering as “it” flies overhead. In English, we “it” the living world, whereas in Potawatomi that’s not possible. We use the same grammar for each other as we do for our plant and animal relatives. (Orion Magazine, 2021)"

"I think we need to re-member these ancient ways of living that are already there and reimagine ourselves in them. (Orion Magazine, 2021)"

"Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us...People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.” (The Guardian, 2020)"

"We tend to shy away from that grief,” she explains. “But I think that that’s the role of art: to help us into grief, and through grief, for each other, for our values, for the living world. You know, I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.” (The Guardian, 2020)"

"“Laws are a reflection of social movements,” she says. “Laws are a reflection of our values. So our work has to be to not necessarily use the existing laws, but to promote a growth in values of justice. That’s where I really see storytelling and art playing that role, to help move consciousness in a way that these legal structures of rights of nature makes perfect sense. I dream of a day where people say: ‘Well, duh, of course! Of course those trees have standing.’” (The Guardian, 2020)"

""I just have to have faith that when we change how we think, we suddenly change how we act and how those around us act, and that’s how the world changes. It’s by changing hearts and changing minds. And it’s contagious." (The Guardian, 2020)"

"when you know the plants, you just feel more at home wherever you go (2015)"

"People have forgotten that plants were once regarded as our oldest teachers (2015)"

"the indigenous worldview of respect and reciprocity carries the values that we need to survive (2015)"

"As we give thanks for the Earth, will we live in such a way that the Earth can be grateful for us? (2015)"

"I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have a capacity to learn, to have memory. And we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings."

"in a sense, the questions that I had about who I was in the world, what the world was like, those are questions that I really wished I’d had a cultural elder to ask; but I didn’t. But I had the woods to ask. And there’s a way in which just growing up in the woods and the fields, they really became my doorway into culture. In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders, instead."

"it delights me that I can be learning an ancient language by completely modern technologies, sitting at my office, eating lunch, learning Potawatomi grammar."

"there was no question but that I’d study botany in college. It was my passion — still is, of course. But the botany that I encountered there was so different than the way that I understood plants. Plants were reduced to object. What was supposedly important about them was the mechanism by which they worked, not what their gifts were, not what their capacities were. They were really thought of as objects, whereas I thought of them as subjects. And that shift in worldview was a big hurdle for me, in entering the field of science."

"Why is the world so beautiful? is a question that we all ought to be embracing."

"One of the difficulties of moving in the scientific world is that when we name something, often with a scientific name, this name becomes almost an end to inquiry. We sort of say, Well, we know it now. We’re able to systematize it and put a Latin binomial on it, so it’s ours. We know what we need to know. But that is only in looking, of course, at the morphology of the organism, at the way that it looks. It ignores all of its relationships. It’s such a mechanical, wooden representation of what a plant really is. And we reduce them tremendously, if we just think about them as physical elements of the ecosystem."

"that kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants."

"In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an “it,” that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn’t tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it’s the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as “it.” In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “its.”"

"Just as it would be disrespectful to try and put plants in the same category, through the lens of anthropomorphism, I think it’s also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself."

"what is the story that that being might share with us, if we knew how to listen as well as we know how to see?"

"science asks us to learn about organisms, traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them."

"the language of “it,” which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can’t help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature."

"I think that’s really important to recognize, that for most of human history, I think, the evidence suggests that we have lived well and in balance with the living world. And it’s, to my way of thinking, almost an eyeblink of time in human history that we have had a truly adversarial relationship with nature."

"The idea of reciprocity, of recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us, is I think a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. And some of our oldest teachings are saying that what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift."

"a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can’t just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That’s not going to move us forward."

"we can’t have an awareness of the beauty of the world without also a tremendous awareness of the wounds; that we see the old-growth forest, and we also see the clear cut. We see the beautiful mountain, and we see it torn open for mountaintop removal. So one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love, and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn."

"Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world the same way after having seen it through her eyes."

"Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how the factual, objective approach of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people. It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most-the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain and a meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page."

"Even a wounded world is feeding us," writes the Indigenous plant scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. "Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."

"Few books have been more eagerly passed from hand to hand with delight in these last years than Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. She’s written, “Science polishes the gift of seeing; Indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss, a bryologist, she describes mosses as “the coral reefs of the forest.” She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life that we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate."

"Behind her, on the wooden bookshelves, are birch bark baskets and sewn boxes, mukluks, and books by the environmentalist Winona LaDuke and Leslie Marmon Silko"

"Robert Macfarlane told me he finds her work “grounding, calming, and quietly revolutionary”."

"In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library."

"Five severed fingers do not make a hand."

"People say that I’m sour and misanthropic, and I tell them they’re probably right. Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me."

"The Leavers and the Takers are enacting two separate stories, based on entirely different and contradictory premises."

"“As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.” “Yes, that’s certainly how it’s understood. People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central hearing and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’” I gave him a quizzical look. “And what are you saying?” “I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”"

"The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world."

"It’s pointless to argue with mythology."

"There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now."

"We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there."

"The law we’re looking for here is much like that with respect to civilizations. It’s not about civilizations, but it applies to civilizations in the same way that it applies to flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between human civilizations and beehives. It applies to all species without distinction. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product."

"But, alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects."

"The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers."

"I no longer think of what we’re doing as a blunder. We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it."

"Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated."

"“‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.” “You said it was a paradox?” “No, he said it was a paradox.” “Why?” Ishmael shrugged. “I’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”"

"Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population. Obviously it has to have this result, and to predict any other is simply to indulge in biological and mathematical fantasies."

"Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you’re enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today—and promise population control tomorrow."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler."

"You must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion."

"If the will is there, the method will be found."

"Obviously Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive, and that’s something the people of your culture can do. She has no existence outside your minds. Once you stop listening to her, she ceases to exist."

"The world was not made for any one species."

"Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world."

"“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’”"

"Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture."

"In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself—and they’re doing a damned good job of it."

"The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man.... The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world."

"Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all."

"Daunting isn’t nearly strong enough. To call it daunting is like calling the Atlantic damp."

"“One thing I know people will say to me is ‘Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?’” “That of course is an inane idea,” Ishmael said. “The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers.”"

"“The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. During the last century every remaining Leaver people in North America was given a choice: to be exterminated or to accept imprisonment. Many chose imprisonment, but not many were actually capable of adjusting to prison life.” “Yes, that seems to be the case.” Ishmael fixed me with a drooping, moist eye. “Naturally a well-run prison must have a prison industry. I’m sure you see why.” “Well…it helps to keep the inmates busy, I suppose. Takes their minds off the boredom and futility of their lives.” “Yes. Can you name yours?” “Our prison industry? Not offhand. I suppose it’s obvious.” “Quite obvious, I would say.” I gave it some thought. “Consuming the world.” Ishmael nodded. “Got it on the first try.”"

"It should be noted that what is crucial to our survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself."

"Atterley’s message seemed difficult to summarize and was typically characterized as “mind-boggling” by those who were favorably impressed and as “incomprehensible” by those who weren’t."

"Anyone who thinks the Church is open to new ideas is living in a dreamworld."

"Programs are initiated in order to counter or defeat vision."

"I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision.” “The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire."

"“Always has been my guiding principle for forty years to say ‘Never trust a Christian.’ Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change.”"

"I closed my eyes and found the interior rooms of my head quite thoroughly deserted."

"“It doesn’t matter that everyone ‘knows’ the human race is three million years older than the cities of Mesopotamia. Every molecule of thought in our culture bears the impress of the idea that we needn’t look beyond the Mesopotamian horizon in order to understand our history.”"

"Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to to our beliefs, God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along."

"Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong."

"“I guess this is what you mean when you say that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds. People with unchanged minds will say, ‘Let’s minimize the effects of pushing the button.’ People with changed minds will say, ‘Let’s throw the box away!’”"

"“Now, the way the Zeugen imagined it, the gods have a special knowledge that enables them to rule the world. The knowledge includes the knowledge of who should live and who should die, but it embraces much more than that.This is the general knowledge the gods employ in every choice they make. What the Zeugen perceived is this, that every choice the gods make is good for one creature but evil for another, and if you think about it, it really can’t be otherwise. If the quail goes out to hunt and the gods send it a grasshopper, then this is good for the quail but evil for the grasshopper. And if the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods send it a quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. And vice versa, of course.If the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods withhold the quail, then this is good for the quail but evil for the fox. Do you see what I mean?” “Of course.”"

"But when we look back beyond our agricultural revolution into the human past, we no longer understand what people had in mind. We don’t understand what they had in mind as they lived through tens of thousands of years without trade and commerce, without empires or kingdoms or even villages, without accomplishments of any kind."

"The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed—and therefore destined—to become us. This is a twin of the idea that the entire universe was created in order to produce this planet. We would smile patronizingly if the Gebusi boasted that humanity was divinely destined to become Gebusi, but we are perfectly satisfied humanity was divinely destined to become us."

"The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that."

"What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind."

"The religions I just mentioned—the revealed religions—are fundamentally wed to our cultural vision, and I use the word wed advisedly. These religions are like a harem of sanctimonious wives married to a greedy, loutish sensualist of a husband."

"“To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn’t even belong in this list, since it doesn’t link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or by rising above it.” “True.” “The adherents of these religions are mightily struck and obsessed by their differences—to the point of mayhem, murder, jihad, and genocide—but to me, as I say, you all look alike."

"So, this is the Taker vision: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it."

"It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian."

"Pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy doesn’t eliminate you instantly, Jared, it eliminates you eventually."

"In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or race schism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense of self-eliminating. That is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight."

"If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs."

"The important thing to note is that the vision grew out of the lifestyle, the lifestyle didn’t grow out of the vision."

"If I were someone else, I’d try to console you with a fairy tale like the one they tell about Santa Claus every Christmas. I’d tell you that Mommy’s going to be taken up to heaven to live with God and the angels, and from there I’ll look down and watch over you. The truth is better than this—partly because it is the truth."

"Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before—but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process."

"“Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared?” “No.” “But the god of this place has as great a care for them as for any other creature in the world. This is why I knew you could benefit from seeing those beetles yesterday. Those beetles are a manifestation of the gods’ unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who have eyes to read. I wanted you to see how the gods lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon a beetle whose supreme achievement is burying a mouse than upon the brain of Einstein, no less upon a mite whose favorite dish is a fly’s egg than upon the eye of Michelangelo.”"

"You don’t have to understand what you see but you must at least make an effort to see what you see."

"“Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to ’live against’ it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we’re seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”"

"These caves aren’t art galleries or shamanistic temples, they’re schools of the hunting arts—the equivalent of one of our museums of science and industry."

"All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together."

"I am at what seminarians used to call “the Company Farm,” which is where you go when you “need a little rest”—or a little vacation from booze—or the whispers about you and the altar boys are beginning to get a bit noisy. All the big orders have them, of course, some of them have several, thoughtfully specialized. Naturally they are not called penitentiaries anymore; nowadays they are called retreat centers."

"“And you actually authorized his assassination?” The man shrugged. “You said it very well, Jared: These days are still those days. Nothing’s changed in the last five hundred years—or the last thousand—except that heretics cannot longer be executed in public. I take all this as seriously as Pope Innocent the Third, who ordered up a crusade against the Albigenses. I take it all as seriously as Pius the Fifth, who, when he was the grand inquisitor, personally instigated the massacre of thousands of Protestants in southern Italy. I take it all as seriously as Thomas Aquinas, who said, ’if ordinary criminals may be justly put to death, then how much more may heretics be justly slain.’ For Thomas well knew that the murderer just shortens his neighbors’ temporal life, whereas the heretic deprives them of eternal life. If you no longer understand the difference—or if it no longer matters to you—then I assume you’ve lost your faith.”"

"I left, and because it seemed like a good time to start being a little less incredibly trusting, I didn’t turn my back on him till I was outside with the door shut between us."

"“The question is, can you do would B did?” “What exactly do you have in mind?” “You took in their insights, but do you have any of your own? Are you a thinker and a teacher or just a reciter of Holy Writ? If all you can do is chant the Scriptures, then you’re no more B than I am. You’re just an altar boy who has all the responses down pat.”"

"What works, evidently, is cultural diversity. This should not come as a surprise. If culture is viewed as a biological phenomenon, then we should expect to see diversity favored over uniformity. A thousand designs—one for every locale and situation—always works better than one design for all locals and situations. Birds are more likely to survive in ten thousand nest patterns than in one. Mammals are more likely to survive in ten thousand social patterns that in one. And humans are more likely to survive in ten thousand cultures than in one—as we are in the process of proving right now. We’re in the process of making the world unlivable for ourselves—precisely because everyone is being forced to live a single way. There would be no problem if only one person in ten thousand lived the way we live. The problem appears only as we approach the point where only one person in ten thousand is permitted to live any other way than the way we live. In a world of ten thousand cultures, one culture can be completely mad and destructive, and little harm will be done. In a world of one culture—and that one culture completely mad and destructive—catastrophe is inevitable."

"The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs."

"It means I’ve been changed, fundamentally and permanently. It means I cannot be put back to what I was. That’s why I am B: I cannot be put back to what I was."

"I wonder if you’ve ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?"

"A few years ago, when I begin speaking to audiences, I have the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to not saying it at all."

"What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was the fact that, before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.…Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time."

"Q. Wasn’t agriculture developed as a response to famine? A. Agriculture is useless as a response to famine. You can no more respond to famine by planting a crop than you can respond to falling out of an airplane by knitting a parachute. But this really misses the point. To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn’t cure famine, it promotes famine—it creates the conditions in which famines occur. Agriculture makes it possible for more people to live in an area than that area can support—and that’s exactly where famines occur."

"Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others."

"Without a standing army, a king is just a windbag in fancy clothes."

"Crimes are what the state defines as crimes."

"In 1950 there wasn’t the slightest whisper of a doubt about this anywhere in our culture, East or West, capitalist or communist. In 1950 this was something everyone could agree on: Exploiting the world was our God-given right. The world was created for us to exploit. Exploiting the world actually improved it! There was no limit to what we could do. Cut as much down as you like, dig up as much as you like. Scrape away the forests, fill in the wetlands, dam the rivers, dump poisons anywhere you want, as much as you want. None of this was regarded as wicked or dangerous. Good heavens, why would it be? The earth was created specifically to be used in this way. It was a limitless, indestructible playroom for humans. You simply didn’t have to consider the possibility of running out of something or of damaging something. The earth was designed to take any punishment, to absorb and sweeten any toxin, in any quantity. Explode nuclear weapons? Good heavens, yes—as many as you want! Thousands, if you like. Radioactive material generated while trying to achieve our God-given destiny can’t harm us. Wipe out whole species? Absolutely! Why ever not? If people don’t need these creatures, then obviously they’re superfluous! To exercise such control over the world is to humanize it, to take us a step closer to our destiny."

"I’ve said that this new era of the collapse of values began in 1960. Strictly speaking, it should be dated to 1962, the year of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the first substantive challenge ever issued to the motivating vision of our culture."

"What is observed in the human population is that intensification of production to feed and increase the population invariably leads to a still greater increase in population. I’ve seen this called a paradox, but in fact it’s only what the laws of ecology predict. Listen to it again: “Intensification of production to feed an increase the population invariably leads to a still greater increase in population.”"

"History—and not just thirty years of history but ten thousand years of history—offers no support whatever for the idea that we can simultaneously increase food production and end population growth. On the contrary, history resoundingly confirms what ecology teaches: If you make more food available, there will be more people to consume it."

"And of course I have to deal with the starving millions. Don’t we have to continue to increase food production in order to feed the starving millions? There are two things to understand here. The first is that the excess that we produce each year does not go to feed the starving millions. It didn’t go to feed starving millions in 1995, it didn’t go to feed the starving millions in 1994, it didn’t go to feed the starving millions in 1993, it didn’t go to feed starving millions in 1992—and it won’t go to feed the starving millions in 1996. Where did it go? It went to fuel our population explosion. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that everyone involved in the problem of world hunger knows that the problem is not a shortage of food. Producing more food does not solve the problem, because that’s simply not the problem. Producing more food just produces more people."

"When all else fails, it will be objected that the people of the world will not tolerate a limit on food. That may be, but it has nothing to do with the facts presented here."

"No one has ever specifically asked me what I have against birth control, but I’ll answer the question anyway. I don’t have a thing against birth control as such. It just represents a very poor problem-solving strategy. The rule in crisis management is, Don’t make it your goal to control effects, make it your goal to control causes. If you control causes, then you don’t have to control effects."

"It can’t possibly be said too often that there is no one right way for people to live; that’s only the delusion of the most murderous and destructive culture that history has ever produced."

"The tribal life is precious because it tested out. For three million years it worked for people. It worked for people the way nests work for birds, the way webs work for spiders, the way burrows work for moles, the way hibernation works for bears. It doesn’t make it lovable, that makes it viable. People will also say to me, “Well, if it was so wonderful, why didn’t it last?” The answer is that it did last—it has lasted right up to the present moment. It continues to work, but the fact that something works doesn’t make it invulnerable. Burrows and nests and webs can all be destroyed, but that doesn’t change the fact that they work. Tribalism can be destroyed and indeed has largely been destroyed, but that doesn’t change the fact that it worked for three million years and still works today as well as it ever did. And the fact that tribalism works doesn’t mean that something else can’t work. The trouble is that our particular something else isn’t working—doesn’t work and can’t work. It bears with it its own seeds of destruction. It’s fundamentally unstable. And unfortunately it had to reach global proportions before the nature of its instability could be recognized."

"You’re not surprised that natural selection has organized geese in a way that works well for geese. You’re not surprised that natural selection has organized elephants in a way that works well for elephants. You’re not surprised that natural selection has organized dolphins in a way that works well for dolphins. Why should you be surprised that natural selection organized people in a way that worked well for people?"

"And conversely, why should you be surprised if the founders of our culture, having obliterated a lifestyle tested over a period of three million years, were unable to instantly slap together a replacement that was just as good? Really, the task was a formidable one. We’ve been working at it for ten thousand years, and where are we? The very first thing to go was the very thing that made tribal life a success: its social, economic, and political egalitarianism. As soon as our revolution began, the process of division began, between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, masters and slaves. The suffering class had arrived, and that class (as it would always be) was the masses. I won’t repeat a tale everyone knows. Just a few thousand years separates the bare beginning of our culture in rude farming villages from the age of the god-kings, when the royal classes lived in mind-boggling splendor and all the rest—the suffering masses—lived like cattle."

"The world must live, the world must live! We are only one species among billions. The gods don’t love us more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies."

"No story is devoid of meaning, if you know how to look for it. This is as true of nursery rhymes and daydreams as it is of novels and epic poems."

"Don’t make faces. It won’t hurt you to hear a new word."

"No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike."

"I told him these numbers were hard to believe. “Do the arithmetic yourself sometime, then you won’t have to believe it, you’ll know it."

"People seldom look very hard for things they don’t want to find."

"Those who wish to imagine that God called every species to life in a final, changeless form are welcome to do so, but I’m incapable of embracing such a primitive scenario."

"They’re sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with ever tribal way of life, and of course they’re correct—if you mean by “wrong” something you don’t like."

"The schools are there to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market."

"Mother Culture’s deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people. In fact, they exist to serve the needs of your economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits your economic needs perfectly. What you’re seeing at work in your schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency."

"By the simple act of being locked up, food was transformed into a product—the fundamental product of your economy."

"A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the system."

"Six billion of you wake up every morning and start devouring the world."

"Of course, there is no one right way for people to live, any more than there is one right way for birds to build nests or for spiders to spin webs."

"“This may be totally wrong,” I told him. “This may just be the simple truth, but this is what I hear: ‘sure, you can save the world, but you're really going to hate it. It's really going to be painful.’” “Why is it going to be painful?” “Because of all the stuff we have to give up. But as I say, this may just be the simple truth.” “No, it's not the simple truth, Julie. It's Mother Culture’s simple lie. Although Mother Culture is a metaphor, she really does behave uncannily like a real person sometimes. Why do you think she would tell this particular lie?” “She wants to discourage us from changing, I guess.” “Of course. Her whole function is to preserve the status quo. This is not a peculiarity of your Mother Culture. In every culture, it's the function of Mother Culture to preserve the status quo.”"

"That’s what governments are there for, to keep good things from happening."

"Mrs. May's bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened-like some patient god come down to woo her-for a stir inside the room."

"Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still."

"...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character. ("The Fiction Writer & His Country")"

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. ("Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction")"

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. ("The Regional Writer")"

"I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are. ("Writing Short Stories")"

"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. ("Writing Short Stories")"

"I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation. ("The Teaching of Literature")"

"The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in real life. ("Catholic Novelists and their Readers")"

"stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. ("The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South")"

"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one."

"The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience."

"No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made."

"There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention."

"The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions."

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't write fiction. It isn't grand enough for you."

"Mr. Head awakened to discover that the room was full of moonlight. He sat up and stared at the floor boards-the color of silver-and then at the ticking on his pillow, which might have been brocade, and after a second, he saw half of the moon five feet away in his shaving mirror, paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter. It rolled forward and cast a dignifying light on everything. The straight chair against the wall looked stiff and attentive as if it were awaiting an order and Mr. Head's trousers, hanging to the back of it, had an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant; but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated over the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him. (beginning of "The Artificial Nigger")"

"Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. (beginning of "Good Country People")"

"He liked parades with floats full of Miss Americas and Miss Daytona Beaches and Miss Queen Cotton Products. He didn't have any use for processions and a procession full of schoolteachers was about as deadly as the River Styx to his way of thinking. ("A Late Encounter with the Enemy")"

"The Negro will in the matter of a few years have his constitutional rights and we will all then see that the business of getting along with each other is much the same as it has always been, even though new manners are called for. The fiction writer is interested in individuals, not races; he knows that good and evil are not apportioned along racial lines and when he deals with topical matters, if he is any good, he sees the long run through the short run. (1963)"

"The short story writer particularly has to learn to read life in a way that includes the most possibilities--like the medieval commentators on scripture, who found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text. If you see things in depth, you will be more liable to write them that way. (1959)"

"I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. (1959)"

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. (1958)"

"I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. (1956)"

"It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries. (1956)"

"The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it....If you manage to use it successfully for social, religious, or other purposes, it is because you make it art first. (1956)"

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. (1955)"

"Conviction without experience makes for harshness. (1955)"

"charity is beyond reason, and that God can be known through charity."

"About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do"

"One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true."

"Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn't bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can't fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenom of Man et al.). He was a paleontologist-helped to discover Peking man-and also a man of God. I don't suggest you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a sceptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes its place in the general scheme of things."

"If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn't satisfactory read others. Don't think that you I have to abandon reason to be a Christian. A book that might help you is The Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson. Another is Newman's The Grammar of Assent. To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones"

"Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian scepticism. It will keep you free-not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you."

"...Men and women do not write differently. In the United States, for example, the best of contemporary prose-writers is a woman - Flannery O'Connor - recently deceased."

"That's one of the reasons I love O'Connor: Everything is so Catholic and bizarre at the same time."

"As Flannery O'Connor once noted, writers are difficult biographical subjects; her own life story, O'Connor said, consisted mostly of walking from the house to the barn and back again."

"Every young writer should read Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find at least three or four times. If you’ve ever thought creativity was opposed to clarity, or that funny stories aren’t serious, or that stories about abnormal people are about abnormal people, or that the road to the realistic was through realism—O’Connor is here to disabuse you, with pleasure. And do take note of her characterization and story structure, too! Textbook."

"I can think of no American writer who has made a more devastating use of existential intuition. She does so, of course, without declamation, without program, without distributing manifestoes, and without leading a parade."

"The greatest of Flannery O'Connor's books is her last, post-humously-published collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. Though it is customary to interpret O'Connor's allusion to the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin as ironic, it seems to me that there is no irony involved. There are many small ironies in these nine stories, certainly, and they are comic-grotesque and flamboyant and heartbreaking- but no ultimate irony is intended and the book is not a tragic one. It is a collection of revelations; like all revelations, it points to a dimension of experiential truth that lies outside the sphere of the questing, speculative mind, but which is nevertheless available to all."

"There are lots of women writers in the South, like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, who wrap you up in a story. They come from a tradition of storytellers which is amazingly similar to the Puerto Rican cuento. "Te voy a echar un cuento," eso era eso era lo que Mamá decía. (CDH: The tradition of oral transmission is common among minorities, especially among immigrants.) JOC: Of course. When you read Flannery O'Connor, you almost hear her. It wasn't until I was an adult that I discovered Latino writers who do the same thing, but by that time I had been influenced by the storytellers of the South and by my grandmother."

"Flannery O'Connor-I use her all the time in my classes, and I tell my students, "Look, look what she's done." The students'd say, "Oh, she just writes about the same old area and countryside." "Well," I said, "yes, that's true. I understand as a person, especially as she was ill in her later years, she really didn't move around very much," and I said, "and that in a sense is one of her greatest achievements, just to take these same sorts of things again and again and again to make these magnificent stories, you know."

"She was for me the first great modern writer from the South, and was, in any case, the only one I had read who wrote such sly, demythifying sentences about white women as: "The woman would be more or less pretty-yellow hair, fat ankles, muddy-colored eyes."

"O’Connor’s works are full of evil mockery, occasionally reminiscent of Baudelaire or Kundera. Don’t expect to find things like love, tenderness, or sentiment in her stories. This makes me tremendously happy."

"I wrote Thank God for Evolution! mostly to help religious believers from different traditions move toward an evidential worldview without having to abandon their tradition and join the atheist/humanist camp to do so. ...Few things are more important... than for... of religious believers... to embrace a science-based understanding of the world. ...Trying to understand reality without an evolutionary worldview is like trying to understand infection without microscopes or the structure of the universe without telescopes. It's... impossible."

"I dedicate this book to the glory of God."

"I promise that this book will provide... an experience of science, and evolution specifically, that will fire your imagination, touch your heart, and lead you to a place of deep gratitude, awe, and reverence."

"You will... find here effective ways to talk about evolution to any friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors who are biblical literalists or young earth creationists."

"To agnostics, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers... you will find nothing here that you cannot wholeheartedly embrace as... rationally sound, mainstream scientific understanding of the Universe. ...[T]he vision of "evolutionary spirituality" presented here will benefit you and your loved ones without your needing to believe in anything otherworldly."

"Discussing Thank God for Evolution! with those you care about will open new doors of possibility... and provide common ground where none existed before. This book is a perfect gift, not to convert others to your way of thinking but to converse... deeply and heartfully about those things that matter most."

"I met Connie Barlow at a lecture... Connie was the author of four books, and two of them had "evolution" in their titles... She, too, was a long-time "epic of evolution" enthusiast. ...[H]er passion for sharing a sacred understanding of cosmic history was no less than mine. Seven months later I asked Connie to marry me."

"Connie was a self-described atheist, and her professional life was steeped in the sciences. My life was devoted to religion. Our union embraces both."

"[W]e were watching... Evolution: A Journey into Where We Came From and Where We're Going. ...episode ..."What About God?" It examined the struggle that conservative Christian college students face in trying to embrace both evolution and a pre-evolutionary interpretation of their faith. ...Connie ...said, "You need to be out there talking to those students. ...to show how an evolutionary understanding can enrich one's faith!" ...A few weeks later, after a frustrating day at work, I told her (not really serious...) "...I wish we could travel non-stop, teaching and preaching the Great Story ..." Her response... "I'd love to do that!""

"[W]e chose to display on our van both a Jesus fish and a Darwin fish—kissing. A retired biology professor... laughed, "Oh great! Now you piss everyone off!""

"God's gift of science reveals that our faith traditions are... meaningful and grounded in undeniable reality... When we focus... on points of broad consensus rather than... legitimate disagreement, conflicts... lose their grip."

"[T]he fact that our Universe has been transforming along a discernible path for billions of years—the fact that creation was not a one-time event—is of little or no dispute. ...[T]his undeniable fact ...makes me want to shout from the mountaintops: "...The war is over!""

"Traditional religions have played crucial roles in fostering cooperation within each tribe, kingdom, and early nation—though not infrequently by provoking suspicion and enmity of those outside the group. ...[T]o fulfill their potentials in our postmodern world, each will have to harmonize its core doctrines with the evolutionary world view. ...[T]he evolutionary outlook bolsters their core teachings. Instead of an intrusion... a precious blessing."

"Evolutionary versions of each religion... are emerging. ...[A]dherents of each religion have discovered ...Religious insights and perspectives freed from the narrowness of their time and place of origin are more comprehensive and grounded in measurable reality ...Evolution does not diminish religion; it expands its meaning and value globally."

"[M]any... believers have rejected evolution because... [it] has been depicted as random, meaningless, mechanistic, and Godless. The growing edge of evolutionary thinking... points to a very different understanding... a... realistic picture of divine creativity. ...a Universe astonishingly ...suited for life and ...consciousness."

"Scientists... are moving away from a mechanistic... way of thinking and into an emergent, developmental worldview. Evolution... can be embraced as God glorifying and Christ edifying."

"The ancient religious paths are aching for coherence with the great discoveries born of the quest to understand this... Universe, the living world, our evolved selves, and... our innermost psyches."

"[M]y intent is to help you see what I see—science and religion can be mutually enriching."

"[F]or... over 99 percent of human history—there is little evidence that any culture understood developmental time and space... remotely similar to... today. Nevertheless, the big cosmological questions demanded answers, and so the answers came. ...Orally transmitted stories would evolve—until (and if!) they were written down and declared to be the unchanging revelation of God. When a story becomes scripture, it ceases to evolve."

"School textbooks, unfortunately, sometimes render science as dogmatic as any fundamentalist doctrine. In truth, science is quintessentially open to revision and discovery."

"[W]hat a difference it makes to be groping our way forward in faith—in partnership with God, or, should you prefer less traditional terminology: trusting the Universe... Reality... Time."

"So long as religious and political leaders continue to ignore our evolutionary heritage, and thus do not put in place structures of internal and external support that can withstand the high dosages of that high status and power necessarily confer, then there will be no hope for a less calamitous future."

"Understanding the unwanted drives within us as having served our ancestors for millions of years is far more empowering than imagining that we are the way we are because of inner demons, or because the world’s first woman and man ate a forbidden apple a few thousand years ago. The path to freedom lies in appreciating one’s instincts, while taking steps to channel these powerful energies in ways that will serve our higher purposes."

"No otherworldly, unnatural paradise can compare with the utterly REAL heaven I now experience... every moment of every day, free of resentment, guilt, and unfinished business. ...By genuinely appreciating my instincts—thanks to the evolutionary world-view—and creating... structures of support, I now, by grace, experience an ease and freedom I've never known before regarding old habits, patterns, and temptations."

"[L]et me slip into pride or arrogance, deception or inauthenticity, blame or resentment, or stingy, ungrateful self-centeredness, and I won't have to worry about burning in some otherworldly hell after I die. I'll be supping with Satan right here and now."

"May I continue to have the humility, strength, and peer encouragement to do what is necessary to remain in this state of grace. May I be a blessing to those around me. May I leave a positive evolutionary legacy, in service to God. And may the light of the living Christ shine within my heart and continue to guide my steps."

"Each and every human being who has ever brought anything of beauty, value, or importance into the world has done so only because... impregnated or in-spirited by some aspect of Beauty, Truth, Love, or other attributes of God. This... is beyond comprehension, beyond... force or free will. ...as if some power greater than ourselves is at work. ...There is a sense of having served, like Mary, as a vessel for something ...greater than our own capacities. ...[[[w:Peak experience|P]eak experience]]s are religious moments ...The story of Jesus's conception can remind us of such miracles in our ...lives."

"Thanks to our fresh understanding of the deep-time face of grace, science and religion... are ushering each other into greatness."

"Denial gets a bad wrap, because denial is instinctual."

"Denial is the largely unconscious habit of thought whereby we refuse to accept the reality of things that are bad or upsetting—or that challenge our world view, our legacy, how we live, what is required of us, and/or our feelings of self-worth or superiority."

"Denial is also the instinctual impulse to reject or discount information that calls into question our hopes, assumptions, or expectations about the future."

"We all have denial instincts... so we... can have compassion for ourselves and for each other... [D]enial often gets a bad wrap. It's often just adaptive inattention."

"The stability of the biosphere has been in decline for centuries and in unstoppable collapse for decades. This "Great Acceleration" of technology and market-driven ecocide is an easily verifiable fact... [A]ll you have to do is Google "Great Acceleration.""

"Evidence is also compelling that the vast majority... will deny this, especially those benefiting from the existing order, those legitimately concerned about the consequences of collapse, and those who fear that accepting reality means "giving up." ...Virtually all of us fit that paragraph ..."

"The history of more than 80 previous boom and bust societies... reveals how and why Homo colossus is destined for near-term extinction."

"Homo colossus is Willam Catton's term for "industrial" humanity. That's where each of us uses 20-50 times the resources, and exudes 20-50 times the waste as Homo sapiens."

"[P]aradoxically, "hope-free" collapse acceptance may be the only thing that can help us not make a bad situation worse—and live fully, fearlessly, and deeply meaningfully, even at TEOTWAWKI."

"Collapse is when a gradual downward trend in biophysical health and wellbeing goes into unstoppable decline; runaway, out of control; etc., it's... abrupt climate change... like 10,000 years of climate change in half a human lifetime. ...This is known as "The Great Acceleration" of Biospheric Collapse."

"At any measuere, absolutely everything that humans rely on... is now in precipitous free fall, unstoppable."

"[I]f you Google "Great Acceleration" you see all these wonderful charts... socioeconomic trends and earth system trends... everything going up. ...[W]e naturally think going up means better. Oh no, because the things... are ecocidal trends... and earth system collapse measures [respectively]."

"[S]ocioeconomic trends: population, motor vehicles, fertilizer constumption, tourism, river dams, etc., ...are the drivers of biosphere collapse. ...These are ecodidal trends and... earth system collapse trends."

"The 's health has been in decline for one or two centuries, and in runaway collapse... for decades... The Great Acceleration of Gaian Collapse."

"Any measurement, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide... We're losing all of the ice of the world... The oceans, the plankton, the corals, the fish, , oceanic dead zones and deoxygenation... and , the amount of soil, the fertility of the soil, the moisture of the soil, and permafrost is releasing tons of methane... unstoppable."

"[W]e are now in a mass extinction... [T]here's only been one mass extinction in the past that we've lost the insects and the forest, and we're now adding carbon dioxide, methane and notrous oxide faster than then..."

"[H]opium is a comforting vision of the future that requires breaking the laws of physics, biology or ecology, such as thinking that we can slow, stop or reverse The Great Acceleration of Gaian Collapse."

"Unstoppable collapse... These extinction level tipping points... thresholds that are already in the rear view mirror. Loss of the world's ice... I consider Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice... my favorite book on climate change. If you only read one book on climate change this year, read that..."

"When most of the ice is gone, the serious global warming begins. ...[L]earn about phase change and ... [W]hen you've got a glass of water, as long as the ice is in there, even if the sun's beating on it, it stays at 32°. Once the ice is gone the temperature goes skyrocketing!"

"Methane belching from the permafrost, the deep and shallow seas, hydrates and clathrates, tropical wetlands.. as well as the millions of wells."

", , and... abrupt non-linear ... ... verified that even if every human being went extinct tonight, stopping emissions immediately, we'd still see 25 to 40 ft of sea level rise in the next two centuries."

"Much insight and wisdom has been assembled in these pages. Take what you like and leave the rest, as the saying goes. And there is a lot to like, much to learn, experiments to be modified and adapted, and a refreshingly creative attempt to take the drama of the constructive engagement of religion and science from the Ivory Towers into the popular culture."

"The message is laid out in Dowd’s book, "Thank God for Evolution"... Dowd presents evolution as a sacred epic of emerging complexity that can be seen as "14 billion years of grace." He sidesteps the question of whose grace... although the book’s title offers a hint. ...[H]e’s not talking about an intelligent designer. Instead, he exhorts his audience to supplant or complement their individual notions of God with sometimes-fuzzy concepts like “cosmic creativity.”"

"In my experience and that of my colleagues, public interest in climate change has actually increased over the past few years - We’re witnessing the effects of climate change with far more frequency than we used to due to increased storms, flooding, and generally wacky weather."

"Far from it! The sooner we tackle climate change, the less extreme the measures need to be to solve it. In fact, most of the things we need to do to solve climate change are things we would want to do anyway for health, economic and social reasons. There are a lot of great reasons to move to a transport system that’s dominated by cycling and public transport options over traffic-inducing, isolating and dirty cars."

"If we let climate change continue unabated, it will affect the most vulnerable first."

"I'm kind of approaching my carbon footprint like I approach my weight, going to the gym regularly, watching what I eat, and realizing I'm not going to lose that 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) all at once, like I want."

"We can be pushing all these individual change things on people, but unless the government steps up, we won't be able to reach the target."

"So maybe the one biggest thing you can do is to get politically engaged, because behavioral change is really slow. Too slow to stop runaway climate change."

"I've always appreciated diversity. I believe that American culture is founded on diversity and for this reason it is still alive and inspiring. I grew up in what you might call an unfortunate part of Los Angeles, where there wasn't much to do but experience the differences, go to different places, and hear different stories."

"The Gulf disaster is worse than a terrible oil leak. It’s the product of a failed energy policy that looked at profits before people and environment."

"Sound and accurate journalism defends our democracy. It's one of the most effective weapons at our disposal to contain the power-hungry. I've always said that All the President's Men is a violent movie. No shots are fired, but words are used as if they were weapons."

"There was a time during a period of national crisis when politicians from both sides of the aisle put partisan politics aside to uncover the truth. There was a time when Democrats and Republicans united to navigate a peaceful ending to a corrupt and criminal presidency. There was a time when members of Congress placed defending our democracy above party interests for the greater good."

"I think he hates me a little, because after all, this year, the year of his professional "boom", there has been more talk about him by virtue of our flirtation than for his performances as an actor! (Barbra Streisand)"

"Redford is a very good collaborator, a kind of alter ego for me: he was that young prince who was blond in appearance, but who had a much darker interior. It was clearly a metaphor for America. And most of the stories we've done together have become love movies, romantic movies. In my opinion, he was the ideal prototype of this kind of event. We never got tired of working together. We've always been somewhat demanding of each other, trying to get the most out of each of us, and we didn't waste time knowing what would work or not. It was a great advantage: we knew each other perfectly. (Sydney Pollack)"

"If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species."

"Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution, and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity. The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species, and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail."

"Using science, technology, and cheap energy, we expanded farmlands, chain-sawed forests, exploited fisheries, mined minerals, pumped oil, and flattened mountains for their buried coal. And we did these things in a way that was not remotely sustainable. By harvesting renewable resources faster than they could regrow, by using non-renewable resources that could not be recycled, and by choking environments with industrial wastes, we were borrowing from future generations and from other species."

"During the last 200 years, per capita energy usage grew eight-fold, while human population expanded at about the same rate. As a result of energy growth, all the things we do with energy became more doable. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining exploded in scale. Energy became so abundant that it seemed we could solve any human problem, now or in the future, just by throwing more energy at it. We even reconfigured our economic system so that it assumes and requires perpetual growth. But growth in fossil-fuel energy can’t continue much longer: depletion and climate change will see to that. And even if we make a wholehearted effort to switch to low-carbon energy sources, we face limits to nature’s supplies of materials with which to make solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and batteries."

"Prior to the widespread use of coal, oil, and natural gas, agrarian societies saw cyclical periods of rise and fall. But the scale of expansion since the dawn of the fossil-fueled industrial revolution, beginning roughly at the start of the 19th century, has been unprecedented. Energy usage per capita has grown 800 percent, as has population. Meanwhile, the contours of society have been transformed: for the first time in human history, most people now live in cities."

"Fossil fuels enabled a dramatic expansion of energy usable by humanity, in turn enabling unprecedented growth in human population, economic activity, and material consumption."

"Global human population has doubled three times in the past 200 years, surging from 1 billion in 1820 to 2 billion in 1927, to 4 billion in 1974, to 8 billion today. Its highest rate of growth was in the 1960s, at over 2 percent per year; that rate is now down to 1.1 percent. If growth continues at the current rate, we’ll have about 18 billion people on Earth by the end of this century. All of this would be fine if we lived on a planet that was itself expanding, doubling its available quantities of minerals, forests, fisheries, and soil every quarter-century, and doubling its ability to absorb industrial wastes. But we don’t. It is essentially the same beautiful but finite planet that was spinning through space long before the origin of humans."

"Limits exist everywhere in nature. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy—pick your field, dig into the literature, and you’ll soon be struck by how everything in the universe is defined by limits of temperature, weight, volume, density, number, power, frequency, speed, and more. Limits enable the functioning of systems at scales from the subatomic realm all the way up to galaxy clusters. If there is any physical thing that could credibly be claimed to be infinite, it is the universe itself. But not all cosmologists believe the universe is infinite, and proving whether it is or not may be impossible in principle. Leaving the totality of the cosmos to one side (an action possible only within the human brain—which does, most assuredly, have its own limits), everything else we encounter in life has boundaries. So, why have many people become obsessed with either denying or overcoming limits, to the point where they appear to feel that life can have meaning only if it’s tied to some limitless thing, quality, or substance? Humanity’s obsession with limitlessness probably began with the origin of language, which enables the asking of questions. People tens of thousands of years ago began to ask, “What happens to our essential sense of self when we die?” Their efforts to manage existential terror likely led them to tell stories about a boundless otherworld in which the dead live forever. Looking up at the night sky, they saw a realm of blackness punctuated by moving points of light; upon this screen they projected their wants, needs, and fears. Our lives and those of all the creatures around us may be brief, these early people must have thought, but there is another dimension that lies beyond—a dimension without endings. We’ve been searching for a path to infinity ever since."

"Agriculture enabled population growth and social complexity, but it gradually robbed soils of nutrients. Sailing ships guided with clocks and navigational charts could increase the scope of trade, but building wooden ships (and making charcoal for forging steel) was leading to the deforestation of whole continents. A reckoning with limits seemed to be in store. Then a miracle happened. People who lived in some key centers of global trade started using fossil fuels—energy sources capable of delivering power in previously unimaginable and seemingly endless quantities. Coal, oil, and natural gas enabled the development of transport technologies (steamships, railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes) that overcame prior limits to the speed of travel and trade, so that products and resources that were abundant in one place could be transported to places where they were scarce. Fossil fuels could be used to increase the rates of resource extraction via powered mining machinery, and to process lower grades of ores as more concentrated ores were depleted. They could be fashioned into plastics and chemicals to substitute for some natural materials that were getting scarce, such as hardwoods and whale oil. And they could be made into artificial fertilizers, which could replace soil nutrients lost due to unsustainable agricultural practices. All these developments together enabled population growth at rates that far outstripped historic trends: human numbers expanded from one billion to eight billion in a mere two centuries. We were, in effect, stretching existing constraints on population and consumption to the point that it was difficult for many people to see that boundaries still existed at all."

"As we’ve grown our population and our per capita consumption rates, we’ve been taking habitat away from other organisms. As a result, nature is in full retreat. Vertebrate and invertebrate animal species have suffered average population declines of 70 percent in the past 50 years, and thousands of plant species are endangered as well."

"For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success."

"It’s sad when loved ones die, and few of us look forward to our own demise; hence the perennial quest for an elixir of eternal life, or at least a cure for cancer. But if nobody died, the planet would quickly fill with humans and empty of all the things that feed and provision us. Death clears space for new life; it is the non-negotiable price of admission to the great banquet of existence."

"…civilization’s survival dilemma in the 21st century is best described by a concept from population ecology—overshoot. This refers to the situation where a crucial resource temporarily becomes more abundant, thereby enabling a group of organisms to grow its population beyond levels that can be sustained over the long run. For a population of field mice in overshoot, the critical resource might consist of small plants whose unusually robust growth has been triggered by high levels of rainfall. For humanity currently, the critical resource is fossil energy. Temporary energy abundance has led to many good things (for some of us, anyway): more food, more people, more commercial products, more knowledge, more comfort, and more convenience. But we are about to become victims of our own success."

"The past few thousand years of human history have already seen several critical accelerators. The creation of the first monetary systems roughly 5,000 years ago enabled a rapid expansion of trade that ultimately culminated in our globalized financial system. Metal weapons made warfare deadlier, leading to the takeover of less-well-armed human societies by kingdoms and empires with metallurgy. Communication tools (including writing, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media) amplified the power of some people to influence the minds of others. And, in the past century or two, the adoption of fossil fuels facilitated resource extraction, manufacturing, food production, and transportation, enabling rapid economic expansion and population growth. Of those four past accelerators, our adoption of fossil fuels was the most potent and problematic. In just two centuries, energy usage per capita has increased eightfold, as has the size of the human population. The period since 1950, which has seen a dramatic increase in the global reliance on petroleum, has also seen the fastest economic and population growth in all of human history. Indeed, historians call it the “Great Acceleration.” Neoliberal economists hail the Great Acceleration as a success story, but its bills are just starting to come due. Industrial agriculture is destroying Earth’s topsoil at a rate of tens of billions of tons per year. Wild nature is in retreat, with animal species having lost, on average, 70 percent of their numbers in the past half-century. And we’re altering the planetary climate in ways that will have catastrophic repercussions for future generations. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole human enterprise has grown too big, and that it is turning nature (“resources”) into waste and pollution far too quickly to sustain itself. The evidence suggests we need to slow down, and, in some cases at least, reverse course by reducing population, consumption, and waste."

"Thank you, Peter, for... this important and timely book. ...I’ve been following your work for several years, and I discussed it in my own recent book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival. The data-driven, mathematical methods you and your colleagues have developed for understanding patterns in history seem highly illuminating. In the U.S., rising economic inequality (since the 1970s) has immiserated the working class, while the number of elites (e.g., billionaires) and elite aspirants (e.g., people with law degrees) has skyrocketed. As you show... these developments align with a historical pattern seen repeatedly in complex societies, and... never seems to end well. In End Times, you lay out... what your analysis means for the United States in the 2020s. It’s not a pretty picture. ...we’re seeing the evidence of increasing polarization and political ill will everywhere."

"Depleting and climate-changing coal, oil, and natural gas have brought about dramatic human population growth, along with immense profits and unprecedented wealth (for the few). But all of these presumed and probably transitory benefits have been based on depleting natural resources, and on processes that are perilously changing the climate and degrading ecosystems across the planet. Every time we pick up a gasoline-powered machine we are viscerally linked to that chain of ersatz benefits and spiraling impacts."

"Climate change is a wicked problem… [and] there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat."

"Intelligence is useful and entertaining. Companies go out of their way to hire applicants with high IQ scores, and spectacular intellectual achievements in the arts and sciences can win the hero-worship of generations ([like] Aristotle, Bach, Einstein). Measuring smarts is the job of an industry. Indeed, smartness is so endlessly praised in modern society that questioning its value may constitute one of the most dissident of human acts. High intelligence has been defined in many ways, but typically as the capacity for abstraction, logic, self-awareness, learning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. High intelligence values itself, selects for itself, and fascinates itself. Our remarkable human intellectual achievements are deeply tied to language, whose development occurred as a self-reinforcing evolutionary feedback process. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans derived a collective survival advantage by developing precursors of language, which enabled them to coordinate their behavior and to plan. But language requires extra brain power, so natural selection also worked to increase brain size, which enabled further development of language, which conferred still more survival advantages, and so on. If evolution produced high intelligence, then high intelligence is latent in evolution. Yet high intelligence is quite rare in nature. While all species communicate to some degree, only one has developed abstract, symbolic language. If language-based high intelligence offers survival advantages, why has it cropped up in nature only once?"

"We’ve spent the last few million years evolving big brains, and we won’t un-evolve them in short order. Further, encouraging dull-wittedness and ignorance would result in terrible short-term consequences (as we Americans are likely to discover during the second Trump presidency). Moreover, intelligence is cool: it gives us art, music, literature, science, mathematics, and so much more. At least some of these achievements and abilities are arguably worth saving. So, what’s our best long-term plan to avert self-destruction, given that intelligence is now baked into our species? There are those who say the solution lies in realizing that we fixate on just one kind of intelligence—linguistic, rational thinking—to the exclusion of others, and that we’d be better served by nurturing multiple intelligences, including musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, and logical-mathematical. That’s good advice as far as it goes. But we’re unlikely to heed it sufficiently until we acknowledge why we came to rely so much on linguistic intelligence in the first place: it gave us power over our environment and over one another. So, our dilemma is as much one of ends (power) as means (language-based intelligence). In addition to needing a counterbalance to linguistic intelligence, we also need a way to check our individual and collective pursuit of excessive power."

"Most environmental dilemmas have to do with limits (usually limits to either resources or to waste sinks). And most environmental solutions have to do with reining in our wants and ambitions in some way. Cleverness may help at the margins—as when chemists identify a relatively harmless substance that can substitute for a toxic one. But without self-limits on population and consumption, no amount of cleverness can halt humanity’s accelerating march toward collapse. Economist William Stanley Jevons got an inkling of this stark reality in 1865, when he published his observation that making coal usage more efficient led to increased coal mining (and depletion), not conservation. Too often, we outsmart ourselves by thinking we’re doing something to save resources and reduce pollution, when in fact we’re just paving the way for more of the same. Another intelligence-resistant problem is deciding what’s a good life or a good death. These are arguably the most important personal questions with which any of us will ever grapple, but intelligence doesn’t always help with answers. It’s true that smart people sometimes avoid a lot of problems that plague less-smart people (such as falling prey to obvious scams and rip-offs). But they just as often end up burdening themselves and others around them with even bigger problems brought on by the unforeseen consequences of their own cleverness—as when a smart investor or inventor accumulates a huge fortune, over which their heirs fight bitterly, to the point that family dynamics are poisoned for generations to come. Finally, there is the uber-problem that should be at the top of all our minds—the long-term survival of humanity. We naturally want our species to stick around. And we like to think that our intelligence improves our prospects in that regard. But, so far, the evidence points in the opposite direction."

"Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space. Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive. However, in a matter of mere centuries, we humans are unraveling the web of life and triggering a mass extinction event that is likely to impact virtually all species on the Earth, and to destabilize the fundamental planetary systems upon which we too depend. Mass extinctions have happened before. The web of life is, paradoxically, both resilient and fragile. On five previous occasions (most recently the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago) our world lost up to 95 percent of its species. The current wave of extinctions that’s being triggered by humans is, so far, not on the same scale, but it is proceeding far more rapidly than previous ones. We humans represent a new kind of threat to the rest of life: our development of language, tool-making, and fire-spreading rendered us hyper-effective hunters and foragers. Tens of thousands of years ago, we were already reshaping landscapes and impacting wildlife. Our ability to expand our own habitat has generated unwanted results: some prey animals were hunted to extinction, and in a process of competitive exclusion, humans caused many local extirpations by appropriating the resources of habitats for themselves. These unintended effects then impacted humans themselves, often by compromising their food supply. Therefore, over time, humans who stayed in any given ecosystem long enough to learn its limits embraced cultural traditions to moderate their demands on it. However, since the start of the European conquest of most of the rest of the world, and especially since society’s rapid adoption of fossil fuels starting around 1800, human impact on the biosphere has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Expanding human populations and associated land use changes, industrial agriculture, industrial forestry, industrial-scale fishing, proliferation of toxic chemicals, and climate change are decimating native species of plants and animals around the world. According to some estimates, populations of many non-domesticated species have declined, on average, by 70 percent, and the pace of species extinctions has quickened to 100 or more times the usual or “background” rate. What will the world come to look like if these trends continue? In one scenario, Earth will have become fully domesticated in a century or two, so that humans and machines control planetary systems (including climate patterns, ocean currents, the water cycle, and the carbon cycle). In this possible case, very little of wild nature will be left. In the far more likely scenario, the unraveling of the web of life and the destabilization of planetary systems will lead to the collapse not just of biodiversity but civilization as well. Is it too late to save biodiversity and the living Earth? … I’ll argue that only a collective effort to put wild nature at the center of our priorities will prevent its devastation and the possible disappearance of our own species, among countless others."

"The world, our world, finds itself caught between a rock and hard place. The relationship that we humans have developed with fossil energy over the last 250 years is a textbook definition of an addiction, and increasingly looks like a Faustian pact: we know that it’s slowly killing us, we know we should be leaving it in the ground and we also know that we will someday have to live without it anyway, yet we just can’t stop burning it and we can’t get enough of it, because we have multiplied our numbers and built our whole world around it. The detox “replacement medications” that we are using do not seem to be working so far, even as we keep increasing their doses. We are of course “pledging” to try harder and harder in the future, yet we keep relapsing into our fossil addiction, year after year, day after day, one flight at a time, one car ride at a time, one purchase at a time, one degree of comfort or of convenience at a time. By doing so we keep turning our eyes and minds away from the real nature of the upcoming and inevitable “energy transition”, the only one that is in fact likely to happen in our lifetimes, and which as Richard Heinberg said will almost certainly be a transition “from using a lot to using a lot less”."

"Phylogeography is a field of study concerned with the principles and processes governing the geographic distribution of genealogical lineages, especially those within and among closely related species. As the word implies, phylogeography deals with historical, phylogenetic components of the spatial distributions of gene lineages. In other words, time and space are the jointly considered axes of phylogeography onto which (ideally) are mapped particular gene genealogies of interest ... The analysis and interpretation of lineage distributions usually require extensive input from molecular genetics, population genetics, ethology, demography, phylogenetic biology, paleontology, geology, and historical geography. Thus, phylogeography is an integrative endeavor that lies at an important crossroads of diverse microevolutionary and macroevolutionary disciplines ..."

"Recent genome-sequencing efforts have confirmed that traditional "good-citizen" genes (those that encode functional RNA and protein molecules of obvious benefit to the organism) constitute only a small fraction of the genomic populace in humans and other multicellular creatures. The rest of the DNA sequence includes an astonishing collection of noncoding regions, regulatory modules, deadbeat pseudogenes, legions of repetitive elements, and hosts of oft-shifty, self-interested nomads, renegades, and immigrants. To help visualize functional operations in such intracellular genomic societies and to better encapsulate the evolutionary origins of complex genomes, new and evocative metaphors may be both entertaining and research-stimulating."

"An example of how this is the best of times for evolutionary biology is provided by the recent elucidation of a draft sequence of all 3-billion-plus nucleotide pairs in the human genome et al. 2001, et al. 2001). ... Some prognosticators believe that the application of recombinant DNA methods to gene therapy and gene replacement (the repair or replacement of defective genes in the body) soon may lead to a revolution in the history of medicine comparable to the introductions of sanitation, anesthesia, and antibiotics and vaccines. If the new recombinant gene technologies live up to their early billing, we or our children might see a day when gene therapy can alleviate sickle cell anemia, heart disease, cancer, or various other human genetic disorders. Just as we may marvel at our forebears' fortitude in the dark ages before the advent of our modern medicine, our grandchildren may look back with marvel at our fortitude in the era preceding the wide availability of gene therapies. Nonetheless, the technical hurdles remain daunting. … … Ecologists and natural historians are painfully aware that the subject matter of their devotion—biodiversity—is under assault worldwide as the continents fill with people. The collective weight of human activities is leading to the disappearance of wilderness. Atmosphere and oceans are being polluted, marine fisheries are collapsing worldwide, and wetlands and freshwater aquifers have shrunk dramatically. In short, Earth's renewable and nonrenewable resources are being tragically squandered. In the Amazon Basin, for example, which is famous for its rich biota, slash-and-burn fires are so numerous that their light is visible to astronauts in the space shuttle. Some of these astronauts have felt moved to speak in a deeply spiritual tenor about the beauty of the “blue planet” and to bemoan how we are despoiling this special, fragile place."

"Scientists now routinely utilize the genetic information in biological macromolecules—proteins and DNA—to address numerous aspects of the behaviors, life histories, and evolutionary relationships of organisms. When used to best effect, molecular data are integrated with information from such fields as , , , , and paleontology. These time-honored biological disciplines remain highly active today, but each has been enriched if not rejuvenated by contact with the relatively young but burgeoning field of molecular evolution."

"A very recent survey of natural s has pointed out that more than 200 species of higher plants comprise the study, that they are widely distributed in the plant kingdom (146 genera in more than 50 families) and that the active principles are known for only about 45 species (Schultes and 1980) , Harvard Univ. 28 (186–190). This survey attributes the lack of chemical knowledge of these plants to two causes: (i) the lack of good animal models which the chemist can utilize in monitoring his isolation work; and (ii) the paucity of field work of scientific trustworthiness in fast disappearing aboriginal societies. The survey ends with the statement that the “… Plant kingdom remains a fertile and almost virgin territory for those interested in the discovery of new psychoactive drugs, not to mention other types of biologically active compounds waiting in silent hiding.”"

"There have long been two strongly divergent poles in our evaluation of ethnobotany. Some students are carried away in an enthusiastic assumption that native peoples everywhere have a special intuition in unlocking the secrets of the Plant Kingdom. Others cast aside or at least denigrate all aboriginal folk lore as not worthy of serious scientific consideration. Both viewpoints, of course, are unwarranted. The accomplishments of native peoples in understanding plant properties so thoroughly must be simply a result of a long and intimate association with their s and their utter dependence on them. Consequently — and especially since so much aboriginal knowledge is based on experimentation — it warrants careful and criticai attention on the part of modern scientific efforts. It behooves us to take advantage now of this extensive knowledge that still exists in many parts of the world, lest it be lost with the inexorable onrush of civilization and the resulting extinction of one primitive culture after another. This experimentally acquired knowledge may not much longer be avaílable."

"has given the world some of its most important plants: the Pará Rubber-tree ('), the Pineapple ('), Cacao ('), the Tapioca Plant or Cassava ('), Coca (' var. ipadu), the Brazil-nut Tree ('), paradise nuts (' spp.), the Curare liana ('), and yet others. Each of these species has local s and wild relatives that may be of inestimable value in future genetic projects that may be oriented towareds various aspects of improving cultivated forms for greater yield, disease resistance, adaptation to different soil and climatic conditions, and sundry other characteristics."

"If you are aware of the actual nest location, it is best to approach it on a path which would lead past the nest. When you are adjacent to the nest, you should turn at right angles to your path of travel, walk directly to the nest and band the nestlings. Once you have banded the nestlings, retrace your steps to your original line of travel. On the return trip from the nest, sprinkle your trail with liberal quantities of crystals. When you reach your original trail, you should again turn at right angles and continue in your original direction of travel ... Thus any predator who picks up and follows your original trail would be discouraged from turning off and following your side trail to the nest. He would be more likely to continue following your trail in your original direction of travel."

"The s mark where they have been and once one has learned to read sign, as woodsmen and professional ornithologists do, one can study food habits. Meat and fishing-eating birds pass conspicuous white urates, commonly called whitewash, and they regurgitate pellets. The splashes of whitewash under a perch suggest that a bird of prey may have used the perch. s, for example, also pass their urates in the form of whitewash, but if the perch is far from a body of water or from a heron rookery, the whitewash was probably passed by a hawk, an owl or a crow. The whitewash of hawks is rather splashy and falls in spatters and streaks. That of owls is far more solid, chalky in texture and tends to form little heaps. Owls tend to gulp their food in big mouthfuls, swallowing many bones—large and small—along with meat. The bones, only slightly digested, persist in the pellets of adults. One can learn a great deal about what owls have eaten by examining the contents of pellets carefully."

"When I was a small child I longed one day to become so famous that I did not have to hide how odd I was—how unlike other people. Few people really held my attention. It was birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and eternally whetted my curiosity."

"In those days, we did a good deal of camping in abandoned houses. spent the first night up in this part of the world in a house. We had him sleep in the living room, because the roof didn’t leak there. And we slept in the kitchen, and we had pans put on the end of the bed. And we could hear the water beating in all night, falling into the pans by our feet."

"A long time ago, thousands of prairie chickens lived in Wisconsin. But as cities grew, the prairie chickens lost their nesting grounds. By 1850, the prairie chicken population began to decrease. In the 1950s, only about 2,500 prairie chickens still lived in Wisconsin. But 2 scientists helped to save them. Those scientists were Frances "Fran" and Frederick Hamerstrom."

"Fran loved wild birds. She always had an owl flying in her house. She was always rehabilitating eagles and hawks in her barn."

"Fran was a very influential biologist in Wisconsin. She worked under and was very instrumental in prairie chicken research and habitat preservation. … she flew and hunted with eagles in the 1960s and 1970s, as a woman. … An Eagle to the Sky .. where she chronicled her adventures with several different eagles, was hugely inspiring to me in pursuing that niche of falconry."

"The general anatomy of the camel is the same as that of other ruminants; but the hump, the horizontal posture of the head, the direction of the eye, the power of closing the nostril, the callosities upon the breast and legs, the spreading and cushioned feet, and above all the curious structure of the stomach, to which he owes his most valuable property, the power of long abstinence from water, distinguish him from all other quadrupeds."

"... Things much used inevitably become much worn, and it is one of the most curious phenomena of language, that words are as subject as coin to defacement and abrasion, by brisk circulation. The majority of those who speak any tongue incline to speak it imperfectly; and where all use the dialect of books, the vehicle of the profoundest thoughts, the loftiest images, the most sacred mentions, that the intellect, the fancy, the heart of man has conceived, there special precautions are necessary to prevent that medium from becoming debased and vulgarized by corruptions of form, or, at least by association with depraved beings and unworthy themes. While, therefore, I would open to the humble and the unschooled the freest access to all the rich treasures which English literature embodies, I would inculcate the importance of a careful study of genuine English, and a conscientious scrupulosity in its accurate use, upon all who in any manner occupy the position of teachers or leaders of the American mind, all whose habits, whose tastes, or whose vocations, lead them to speak oftener than to hear."

"The extension of agricultural and pastoral industry involves an enlargement of the sphere of man's domain, by encroachment upon the forests which once covered the greater part of the earth's surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The felling of the woods has been attended with momentous consequences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configuration of its surface, and probably, also, to local climate; and the importance of human life as a transforming power is, perhaps, more clearly demonstrable in the influence man has thus exerted upon superficial geography than in any other result of his material effort. Lands won from the woods must be both drained and irrigated; river banks and maritime coasts must be secured by means of artificial bulwarks against inundation by inland and by ocean floods; and the needs of commerce require the improvement of natural, and the construction of artificial, channels of navigation. Thus man is compelled to extend over the unstable waters the empire he had already founded upon the solid land."

"... The two problems which face every organism are those of maintaining its own life and continuing its race. Its youth is devoted entirely to satisfying its individual needs for food and safety; its adult life is devoted to the race, but the necessities of the individual are still satisfied though they may be secured in an entirely different way. The immature life of is aquatic, and to it all adjustments concerned with food or safety are exclusively confined. The mature or adult life is aerial. It is solely devoted to reproduction. There is no provision for food or for other means of lengthening its life. It gives an opportunity for studying ways of getting a living which have been completely isolated from ways of reproducing."

"At Kartabo the waters of the meet those of the and soon join the great lake-like flowing north through the low lying country of British Guiana until it runs into the sea at . These rivers are hedged in by the jungle whose undergrowth has invaded the border waters in a persistent attempt to gain more territory. roots swing so far out from the banks that fish swim in and out among them. Moccamoccas, the giant s, have grown out still further. Their clublike stems standing in close rank provide on gigantic scale the kind of animal shelter furnished in more modest form by our own and s. Many slow flowing creeks feed into these larger streams but their mouths are hidden by creepers, tangles of mangrove, and prickly shrubs, and if the currents are gentle enough they are choked by lush growths of '. … Even at Kartabo Point the daily tides are insistent reminders of the ocean forty miles away.The low tide lay bare stretches of muck and ooze, silt and silty sand ... the likely dwelling place of the burrowing and crawling Mayflies ..."

"Different waters hold their own special communities; the dainty glen stream shelters companies of in its swift riffles; pond shallows and meadow brooks are the homes of lurking s; and wayside puddles are populous with s and s. In all these places living things must contend with winter cold and summer drought, with storms and flood waters. In winter the pond populations drop to the bottom, frogs and turtles dig under mud and broken plants, s hide under banks to come out with every warm spell, and fresh water sponges are packed in tough covered capsules. In summer when its own pool dries up the flies to some other pond but many burrow into the mud bottom and endure the drought as best they can."

"Among the s and the water weeds of the shallows, lurk es, s, mud minnows, and young . All of these forage upon snails, crustaceans, and insect larvæ, especially the tempting mayfly nymphs which they find there. s float with their heads just out of water; of all frogs these belong most thoroughly in the pond. Equally at home in it are the painted turtles, and the spotted turtles often found with them … In May and June stumps and floating logs usually carry a load of one kind or the other. They forage in the shallows taking a heavy toll of tadpoles, snails, dragonflies—a miscellaneous bill-of-fare which they always eat under water. Snapping turtles frequent these waters also, catching anything within reach of the lightning-quick thrusts of their heads—fishes, tadpoles, frogs, or crayfishes, as well as the smaller game of insects and worms."

"s are transparent microscopic animals which live in fresh or salt water. They abound in the surface waters of great lakes, and swarm through the shallows of ponds and bogs; there is scarcely any stand of soft water, whether transient puddle or rain-barrel or fountain-basin, where rotifers can not be found. They live in ponds and lakes, providing a large part of the food for small s and worms and are thus indirectly a large source of food for fishes."

"es posses much more beauty and interest than their reputation credits them with. Most of them are marked with concealing colors and patterns, browns, greens, and blacks, picturing upon them the broken shadows and water-soaked leaves of their natural background and hiding them in it. They are sensitive to the slightest vibration of the water, to shadows passing over them, and to small changes in the water around them. Their whole set up is one of exquisite efficiency for their mode of living. … The external features most essential to a leech are the strong muscular suckers at each end of its body and the sucking mouth which which may or may not be armed with jaws … Leeches are segmented worms like bristleworms and common earthworms and belong to the Phylum '."

"As the spawning season approaches, fishes move toward the shores of ponds and lakes or upstream in the creeks. Some of them, such as perch and sunfish, only swim in among nearby weeds or protecting stones. The journeys vary from such short ones to the famous migrations of river salmon, extending over hundreds of miles; but they all end at spawning grounds or nesting sites. During this time color differences between male and female appear or become more marked."

"In most cold winters there is plenty of snow, and this is the greatest aid to wintering insects."

"Crickets.—Crickets, like grasshoppers, vary in their winter habits. Some live over the winter in the ; others hibernate as s. Nymphs of the , Gryllus assimilis pennsylvanicus (which has a short ), hibernate beneath stones ..."

"… Wherever animals live, in fresh water, salt water, or on land, their body fluids are similar; all are salty. In marine invertebrates, whether es or s, the body fluids are practically filtered sea water."

"The s () of s repeat the essentials of kidney form and function, tubules closely associated with blood and body fluid, each one a guardian of the content of the blood. There are two kidneys in nearly every segment of the earthworm ..."

". The power to regrow lost parts permits to survive and even to multiply after injury. Three planarians may live and flourish because one was cut into three pieces. All ns are aquatic. A considerable number live in fresh water and a few on moist soil. Most of them are marine."

"Feeding. The majority of ns are carnivorous. The smaller fresh-water ones feed upon s and worms that are nearly microscopic, the larger one on s, s and , often on their softened remains. Even in quiet waters they can detect juicy meat two or three feet away."

"... s feed upon microorganism from the muck and water of the bottom and in turn are consumed by es, s and mankind."

"... Darwin ... became the official naturalist on the five-year voyage of the "" (1831–1836) ... ... He also read the essay in which Malthus told of the human populations that became too large for the space available to them (1838). This suggested a plan. Some organism must be winnowed out by their natural surroundings; thus, others would be benefited. There would be natural selection."

"... Although she carried on most of her research in the northeastern United States, she spent the summer of 1926 working in at the Tropical Laboratory in Kartabo. Although limnology was her special subject—on which wrote a useful book, Field Book of Ponds and Streams (1930)—Morgan was also interested in many other facets of zoology, particularly hibernating animals. Her Field Book of Animals in Winter (1939) reflected this interest. In 1949 the ' made it into an educational film. She was also interested in conservation and ecology.."

"Morgan's views concerning animal and human interdependence place her among a select group of strong conservationists, of whom the most renowned is probably Rachel Carson ..."

"Wild cheetahs in Africa need help. Suitable prey is becoming scarce and is disappearing. They are suffering from the consequences of human encroachment, from competition with other large predators in game reserves, and not least, from the complication of a limited genetic make-up. The wild population continues to sustain the captive population … The similar experiences of the world's zoos have reaffirmed the traditional difficulties of breeding cheetahs in captivity. Despite the capturing, rearing and public display of cheetahs for thousands of years, one litter was reported in the 16th century by the son of , an Indian mogul. The next documented captive reproduction did not occur until 1956 … … From 1955 to 1994, the number of world zoos holding cheetahs increased from 29 to 211, and the number of animals during this 40-year period increased from 33 to 1218. Since 1955, 1440 cheetahs have been imported from the wild and there have been 2517 births and 3436 deaths …"

"CCF's base of operations is 44 km outside , , as Namibia is home to the largest number of free-ranging cheetah with ±20% (±3,000) of the world’s estimated wild population of ~10,000. The cheetah's survival depends on a total integrated approach: an ecological system of farmland management, prey species management and habitat stability using practices such as alternative , non-lethal predator control, and relocation of problem cheetahs. CCF’s Namibian focus is to work with livestock farming communities in order to develop ways to reduce conflict. This is achieved by devising a conservation plan that secures habitat for the species, while still accommodating farmers’ land use needs."

"Large s are currently facing severe threats and are experiencing substantial declines in their populations and geographical ranges around the world (Ripple et al., 2014). Human-wildlife conflict is a risk to 31% of the global carnivore species (, 2016). The vast majority of Namibia's cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) (over 90%) and other large carnivores reside outside of s. Namibia is made up of a mosaic of land uses which includes both privately owned mixed livestock and wildlife unfenced farms, fenced game farms, and open communal and commercial conservancies. Fences are meant to protect however; fences have an ecological impact by blocking migration movements especially in arid ecosystems. The fences confine individuals in turn carnivore abundance may exceed their available resources leading to a potential rapid decline of the population or local extinction. Commercial farmers have utilised game fences to keep and protected their game which equates to their livelihood. However, game fenced farmers catch more cheetahs than that of livestock farmers (Marker et al. 2010). As more game fences are erected, the rate of human-wildlife conflict has increased, which is an issue not only for the cheetah but all large carnivores across Namibia."

"Predators are exceptionally aware of tourists and their vehicles and sometimes use them to their advantage. If a cheetah has made a kill, it will almost certainly lose it if vehicles are present, since other predators, particularly the hyena, lion or jackal are alerted by the tourists. If the cheetah has cubs, that is a very dangerous situation for them, as they are made more vulnerable by the interference of the vehicles. Research conducted in the recorded that nearly 30% of cheetah sightings had more thant 20 vehicles surrounding it, and of these, more than 50% were less than 30 yards from the animal ..."

"Cheetahs hunt in the early morning and early evening. They capture their prey by stalking to within 10 to 30 meters of their prey or as far as 80 meters before beginning the chase. A chase lasts about 20 seconds and rarely longer than one minute. Only 10 percent of their chases are successful. Antelope and gazelles, hare and the young of larger antelope like s, , or and small often fall prey to the lightning fast cheetahs. Coalition males will often take larger prey like zebra or ostrich. They can accelerate from 0 to 70 kilometres per hour in two seconds. A cheetah will abort a hunt if the prey dodges and darts from it more than three or four times."

"No, I was really excited about doing the stunts. I had never done an action film before and so, that was really exciting and appealing to me. And not to say that it was very easy, right? We definitely got banged up but it’s this sort of gratifying feeling of going home at the end of night and being like ‘I worked hard and look at that big bruise!’"

"One thing I really prioritize is sleep, and it has changed my life genuinely. Another is focusing on how I can nurture and help my self-talk. When I notice negative self-talk hap­pening, how I can sit with it and be friends with it instead of constantly feeling I'm in this rat race of not good enough, not this enough. Becoming a witness to it instead of a victim to it has also dramatically improved my health. Plus, I use astrology: It's simply a tool to give ourselves permission, to accept ourselves and understand ourselves more. The minute I understand that I was built to think this way, instead of judging myself for it, I have acceptance for myself. It's an allowance to have more self-compassion."

"For me, nudity in any film is a matter of what is realistic and authentic, not exploitative or unnecessary. These are the questions that I always ask myself when there is a love scene or a meditation scene on a ship [like in the film Adrift]. What I love about this film is that we explore sensuality in so many moments without needing any sexuality at all. The more we're able to capture sensual moments on screen the more we can start changing our view when it comes to our personal sexualities and sensualities. In a personal way, I find less to be more in most cases and I think leaving things up to the imagination leaves a little mystery when it comes to nudity or sex. It only intrigues the audience more."

"It was so much fun. Everyone was freaked out because I’m nude, but in real life, when I have sex, I’m naked. I don’t have a bra on, and I don’t usually have panties on. So let’s make a real movie! Let’s bring truth to the scene! I didn’t want to be exploited, but this girl—like most girls when they first have sex—doesn’t know what she’s doing. I wanted their first kiss to be sloppy, teenagerish making out. When you’re younger, you think you know what to do, but you really don’t."

"She's a very gentle and grounded person, so I suppose I could say that I'm not worried about her. She knows the industry extremely well. She has a really wonderful family, too. Yeah, of course we talked about it. Of course we do. It's a great privilege to be able to share the experiences I have had with her. Am I going to be specific about what we shared? No [laughs]. But she's going to be just fine. She's a really great human being. She's going to be tremendous actually."

"My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out s and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice."

"As a , I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it. When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work."

"... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done."

"and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of , situated on the in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer."

"Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here."

"Like other emerging towns and cities in the and in the developing world, 's vulnerability to mainstream cultural backwash and population flooding puts it on the list of endangered places. And because it is geographically set in the middle of a true natural wilderness—riverine, high desert plateau of central New Mexico—Albuquerque is particularly defenseless against the fast-paced flow of the mainstream world. The attraction of its emptiness seems as irresistible as gravity. Its image is not only that of an impoverished, charm-ridden hick town eager for tourist jobs and glitz, but its "wilderness" status makes it seem ripe for the picking, like certain portions of the or what used to be the deserted beaches of the ."

"There's little question, in my mind, that development in the West is digging its own grave. Societies, even technologically sophisticated ones, cannot grow and build against basic conditions of and forever. Sooner or later the character of the land will catch up with them. , forced usually by climate change as well as factional disputes and design miscalculations, make that clear."

"Tony Davis, an environmental writer for nearly thirty years, first broke the story that put an end to the myth of 's inexhaustible aquifer. data showed that it was not the size of Lake Superior, but far smaller and more complex than suspected. His handling of the USGS report in the ' gave credibility to the need to create a water conservation program in the city. Davis now writes for the ' in Tucson."

"The - manner of looking at nature according to the principles of painterly composition is symbolized by a device known as a . Reputedly invented as an aid by the painter , it was a convex, dark-toned glass that reflected landscapes in miniature, with "" tints and merging detail. It was popular with s and gentlemen travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and was still used in the first half of the nineteenth century."

"My personal emotional response to , like that of so many others, is sensory—stretching out on a large sun-warmed rock outcrop, watching players and picnickers on the , seeing a great production of The Tempest in the in the gloaming of a summer evening, a flash of red from the plumage of a on a spring day in , walking barefoot on the grass of the , the memory of on the frozen on New Year's Day 1981, listening to the moody sound from a saxophone being played beneath the one of the park's reverberating stone arches ... I could go on."

"During the summer of 1966 and in subsequent years, operated as the venue for rock 'n' roll, jazz, , pop, and concerts sponsored by . Overlooking the objections of his recently appointed Central Park curator, , played on the public's justifiable fear that the park had become unsafe at night: "It's my responsibility to make it so exciting that people will come there in droves, and that also is protection." He did not foresee the event to which his "attractions to draw teenagers" would stimulate the consumption of alcohol and the sale of drugs in the park, nor the effect this would have on the park's landscape and future safety."

"faced the challenge of converting what was still a ragged 843-acre wasteland into a pleasure ground that is a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence, while my task was not to build such an extraordinary civic amenity but to develop a plan and find the means to rescue this underappreciated, wholly original tour de force from further destruction—a less remarkable but nevertheless important feat."

"In this magnum opus, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the and a longtime administrator of that celebrated oasis, stakes out and cultivates a breathtakingly vast terrain: the history of man-made landscape from to the present. Though Rogers focuses on a number of well-known gardens and parks — from of A.D. 118-38 outside Rome to Antonio Gaudí's of 1900-14 in Barcelona — her subject is less than the social interaction of various cultures with their natural settings. Encompassing as much as , this panoramic study is impressive not only for its encyclopedic scope but also for the author's authoritative command of so much diverse material and for her lucid writing."

"Economics is really politics in disguise. We need to unpack the whole thing and say, 'Look, an economy is really nothing but a set of rules. Let's be up front about it. There's no actual science here.'"

"Most of our long-held beliefs about money, wealth, productivity and efficiency, and our notions of progress are rooted in immature, often infantile states of mind—easily manipulated by politicians and advertisers...Luckily, individuals learn faster than institutions and many people may already be ahead of their leaders.""

"If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic."

"s have contested for possession of the waters much as the have contended for supremacy on land, until it may be said that the dominant forage crop of our lakes, ponds, and s is to be found among the pondweeds, the s. Variety in form, adaptability to , and diversity in range have all contributed their share in giving prominence in this group and in furthering a natural resource whose propagation and control are vital factors in the economic relations of the life of inland waters."

"I had to be all things to all fishes."

"Collections of fish were made at weekly intervals and, if not examined at once in their fresh condition, were kept in an - preserving fluid until needed. In examining the food the method of (1918) was employed, that is, the food content of the digestive tract was pressed out upon a , moistened, and examined under the dissecting and compound microscopes."

"... ', one of the largest of the , was produced in enormous quantity by natural means. The blue-green alga, , contributed directly to its support and proved to be the most desirable food of a heavy, natural culture of Daphnia pulex. The author's first observation of this association in the pond occurred on June 21, 1918. At this time a "bloom" of the Aphanizomenon was approaching it maximum. It was so abundant that the water appeared blue-green and oily. A few hand strokes of the net would bring up a of it in concentrated form."

"I often think about maps, because so much of what I do involves measurement. To explain features or processes, you must first describe them. In science the description must be precise and to be accepted, and this requires measurement."

"Rivers are the great shapers of . Rivers transport supplied for hillslope and , in some cases controlling the gradient of the hillslopes (Burbank et al., 1996). As they incise or aggrade to maintain a consistent relationship with their base level, rivers create s that in turn influence local climate; provide travel corridors for animals and humans; and support aquatic and riparian ecosystems that contain some of the Earth's highest levels of biodiversity. ... Although the study of rivers is well-established, the great majority of investigators have worked on the lowland rivers where most people live. Mountain rivers began to receive increasing attention as a subset of rivers only during the last two decades of the twentieth century."

"... relatively few people are aware of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century patterns impacted the mountain rivers of the . When I moved to Colorado in 1989, I was impressed by the sparkling water of the mountain rivers, and I too assumed that these were natural, fully functional rivers. It was only after I began to read historical accounts of the Colorado and to examine the streams more closely that I realized how dramatically they had been altered. I began to think of them as virtual rivers, which had the appearance of natural rivers but had lost much of a natural river's ecosystem functions."

"The and its large tributaries historically hosted an extraordinary assemblage of large-river fish species. The , , , , and ) all have morphological adaptation for life in turbid, fast-flowing waters. Most of these species are now or as a result of flow regulation from s, s, and ."

"Behind our house lay a and . Though only a few s, it constituted wilderness to me. Deer, fox, raccoon, s, s, and s inhabited the woods. From the saplings, I culled poles that I used to build s and s. I built a shelter each summer and experimented with , substituting ground beef for . Then, when I was sixteen, our town decided to join the metropolis. The woodland and marsh were obliterated, replaced with a shopping mall, a church, an apartment complex, and a sunken freeway. I could not have been more hurt if a family member had been attacked."

"Throughout human history, people have settled disproportionately along rivers, relying on the rivers for , , fertile agricultural soils, , and food from aquatic and riparian organisms. People have also devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to altering river processes and form. We are not unique in this respect: ecologists refer to various organisms, from to some species of , as s in recognition of the ability of these organisms to alter the surrounding environment. People are unique in the extent to and intensity with which we alter rivers. In many cases, river engineerings has unintended consequences, and effectively mitigating these consequences requires that we understand rivers in the broadest sense, as shapers and integrators of . once described rivers as the gutters down which flow the ruins of continents (Leopold et al., 1964). His father, Aldo Leopold, described the functioning of an ecosystem as a round river to emphasize the cycling of s and energy."

"About the time I was trying to decide what kind of I wanted to be, I took a hike along the canyon of the in central Arizona. I remember looking at the s along the canyon and feeling a quiet pride—and wonder—that I now understood how those sandbars got there and why they were located exactly there. I've always had trouble turning back rather than following just one more bend of the river to see what's ahead. Contemplating those sandbars, I realized I could spend my life following the next bend and the one after that—and the choice was made. I like natural environments. Cities and rural areas, not so much. I also like to read history and biography and tend to make note of relevant river tidbits I come across, such as descriptions of big logjams or abundant beaver dams that travelers described a century ago on rivers that no longer have those features. And I enjoy traveling and seeing new natural places."

"Saving the Dammed is Ellen Wohl's homage to s, describing their unique engineering prowess, the wider environmental impacts they exert, and why we should care. Throughout the book, Wohl binds a lifetime of professional riverine experience, observations of her local beaver population, gray literature, and primary literature to convey the benefits of beavers and convince the reader why we need more beaver-modified ecosystems."

"The evidence from and fossils indicates that , , and probably the other , are cylinders of slowly building on a sinking or ; has occurred in and younger time, and there were three major periods of emergence during which the coral rocks were weathered subaerially."

"My had developed a craving to have his own land to experiment with a new idea: '. We needed, he said, to find out what the original had been like in our area and what we could do to bring it back. That, and his desire to have a special place to hunt, led to his purchase in the mid-1930s of an abandoned farm along the , in the —"." He specifically chose the Shack land because of its isolation and because this farm was a land of impoverished soil that had become an agricultural failure. In his view this was sick land that needed restoration; it needed to see again the native species that once must have grown here. It was one instance of his larger vision of the countrywide importance of land health and fostering the community of life."

"To better understand how far various grains were transported by wind, she and Allen Solomon (then at the ) set a network of pollen traps near and s in the to match the pollen rain with different . These data were used to develop a pollen-vegetation calibration that still informs studies in the region and beyond."

"A real is never contented with maps of places and pictures of things, but always desires to see the places and things themselves."

"... the only way to become a connoisseur of honey is to keep s, for thus only may one learn to discriminate between honey made from and that gathered from ; or to distinguish, at first taste, the product of in bloom from that drawn from vagrant blossoms, which, changing day by day, mark the season's processional."

"Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it. aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are."

"When Anna Botsford Comstock 1885 died in summer 1930 at the age of seventy-five, the pioneering naturalist left behind not only an ailing husband—famed entomologist , who was severely debilitated by a series of strokes and would pass away just half a year later—but a 760-page manuscript chronicling their decades of marriage, travel, teaching, and scientific study. It would be nearly a quarter-century until that memoir reached a wide readership, in the form of a book compiled by , Anna’s second cousin and the couple’s closest living relative. Published in 1953 by a division of , The Comstocks of Cornell was in fact just part of Anna’s original manuscript. It had been heavily edited by Herrick, also a professor of entomology on the Hill—not only to de-emphasize events and characters he considered irrelevant, but to streamline the language, remove any hint of controversy, and shift the focus toward John Henry’s august accomplishments, including his role as founder of Cornell’s entomology department."

"It is almost a marvel that trees should live to become the oldest of living things. Fastened in one place, their struggle is incessant and severe. From the moment a baby tree is born — from the instant it casts its tiny shadow upon the ground — until death, it is in danger from insects and animals. It cannot move to avoid danger. It cannot run away to escape enemies. Fixed in one spot, almost helpless, it must endure flood and , fire and storm, insects and earthquakes, or die."

"As soon as the 's is completed, it begins to accumulate trash and mud. In a little while, usually, it is covered with a mass of soil, shrubs of begin to grow upon it, and after a few years it is a strong, earthy, willow-covered dam. The dams vary in length from a few feet to several hundred feet. I measured one on the that was eleven hundred feet long. The influence of a beaver-dam is astounding. As soon as completed, it becomes a highway for the folk of the wild. It is used day and night. Mice and porcupines, bears and rabbits, lions and wolves, make a bridge of it. From it, in the evening, the graceful deer cast their reflections in the quiet pond. Over it dash pursuer and pursued; and on it take place battles and courtships. It is often torn by hoof and claw of animals locked in death-struggles, and often, very often, it is stained with blood. Many a drama, picturesque, fierce, and wild, is staged upon a beaver-dam."

"Most insects have enemies to bite them. The spreads death among injurious grubs. Efforts to control forest-enemies will embrace the giving of aid and comfort to those insects that prey upon them. Bugs will be hunted with bugs. Already the in the is being fought in this way. Many species of birds feed freely upon s, borers, and beetles. Of these birds, the s are the most important. They must be protected and encouraged."

"Mills gave occasional talks which led to a career as a speaker. His reputation and influence as a writer provided him with the audiences he needed for lecturing on things he believed in. His career as a lecturer assumed a life and momentum of its own. He would talk about his unique life in the , his devotion to the , and and forest preservation. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the position of Government Lecturer on Forestry, a position he held from 1907 to 1909. During that time he gave 2,118 addresses. His talks awakened interest in trees, , and ."

"We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it not as just so much air, water, and real estate, but as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property. Land is treated like a commodity when it is in fact a trust. Not so long ago our society permitted one human being to own another — to exploit him and even work him to death and not go to jail for it. This is no longer considered acceptable behavior, either by society or by the law. Yet in America today you can murder land for private profit, as is being done, for example, on a vast scale in the southern Appalachians. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. This situation is what is known in history as a "cultural lag." It has occurred because our understanding has not caught up with our technology: a familiar complaint that has become almost a cliché in reference to dramatic modern inventions like the atomic bomb. It is equally true in respect to less spectacular forms of destruction. You can kill land by skinning it alive or by by slowly poisoning it, and it is murder all the same. In the modern world, no one should have life and death control over his land any more than he does over another human being."