Great minds think sustainably
Here is a collection of our favourite quotes on sustainability.
We would like to see this collection grow. One day we might even get round to cataloguing all the quotes into some kind of order. If you have a quote that you would like to see on the site, send it to us and we'll see what we can do.
"The future of life on earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can, but real success can only come if there's a change in our societies and our economics and in our politics. I've been lucky in my lifetime to see some of the greatest spectacles that the natural world has to offer. Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy, inhabitable by all species."
Sir David Attenborough
"Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!"
Dr. Paul MacCready, Jr.
"Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years."
Charles Haas
"The best friend of earth and of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth."
Frank Lloyd Wright
"Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals 'love' them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more."
Edwin Way Teale
"The frog does not drink up the pond in which it lives"
Red Indian proverb
"Only when the last tree is cut down and the last river has dried up will people realise that reciting Red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a muppet"
Banksy
"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."
Henry David Thoreau
I don't think there is anyway of avoiding the fact that we have to use less energy, and the issue is not how do we keep everything going, but how do we change what we want and change how we live?
Rob Hopkins
"In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature."
Mollie Beattie
"If our economies are to flourish, if global poverty is to be banished, and if the well-being of the world's people enhanced - not just in this generation but in succeeding generations - we must make sure we take care of the natural environment and resources on which our economic activity depends"
Gordon Brown
"A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business."
Henry Ford
"However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day. I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence. The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."
Jacques Cousteau
"There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed."
Mohandas K. Gandhi
"The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river."
Ross Perot
"The core values that underpin sustainable development - interdependence, empathy, equity, personal responsibility and intergenerational justice - are the only foundation upon which any viable vision of a better world can possibly be constructed"
Jonathon Porritt
"The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right"
Donella Meadows
"Current trends in consumption will swamp any gains technology does provide unless there are radical changes in the way we consume resources."
Barbara Young
"Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride."
John F. Kennedy