100 favorite quotes

I like the word "gumption" because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along.
-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I must study war and politics so that
my children shall be free to study
commerce, agriculture and other practicalities,
so that their children can study painting,
poetry and other fine things.
-- John Adams

Each year, on average, 600,000 first-year college students take calculus; 250,000 of them fail. What I find even more amazing than this high failure rate is that calculus... is, by just about any standard, one of the greatest intellectual achievements of western civilization. The subject drips with power and beauty. It rendered thousand-year-old questions immediately transparent. Calculus is truly amazing. But, how many students who take the course as freshmen look up and say, "Wow! That's amazing!"? How often, math faculty members, have your students had that experience? I mean, the stuff just sort of goes by. No passion, no soul.
-- Uri Treisman

The ultimate expression of our dumb compliance was in not asking at the outset why the money flowed so freely and how long it would last.
-- Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Hearts that are delicate and kind
and tongues that are neither
these make the finest company in the world.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia

She touched the bricks of Widener Library, the glass cases in the Peabody Museum, as if they were the grail. She had never been particularly sensitive to myth or drama; the anguish of Juliet seemed to her artificial, that of Willy Loman merely wasteful. Only King Arthur, struggling to create a better social order, had interested her. But now, walking under the huge autumn trees, she suddenly caught a glimpse of a force that could span generations, fortunes left to endow learning and achievement the benefactors would never see, individual effort spanning and shaping centuries to come. She stopped, and looked at the sky through the leaves, at the buildings solid with purpose.
-- Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better. It's not.
-- the Once-ler, from The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss

There are a variety of things that could be worked upon, but it's unclear what makes the most sense right now.
-- Edward Jung

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
-- Abraham Lincoln

When we are planning for posterity,
we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
-- Thomas Paine

Not to dream boldly may turn out to be simply irresponsible.
-- George Leonard

It doesn't take money or power to be kind to a stranger, stand by a loved one, or fight injustice. ... We are free, each and every one of us, to determine our own history. To take responsibility for our life and the well-being of those around us.
-- Ron Jones, a Palo Alto high school gym teacher who accidentally started a fascist movement when trying to teach his students about the dangers of fascism.

WHAT IS SUCCESS? To laugh often & much. To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;... To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first question is "What should you be doing?" Not how. There is very little joy in heaven or on earth over an engineering department that, with great zeal, great expertise, and great diligence, produces drawings for the wrong product.
-- Peter Drucker

My life has a superb cast
but I can't figure out the plot.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant

It is beyond me how any human being can be a proud national -- uncritical -- when we consider the many crimes each and every nation has on its conscience. Besides, the nation-state is no longer the appropriate unit for a humanity more and more interlocked in communication, in commerce and in global menaces. It is today about as out-of-date as was the castle in the first World War.
-- Lord Yehudi Menuhin of Britain

You always can blame any particular difficulty on something that is not overpopulation. Nobody ever dies of overpopulation. They die of famine, pestilence, and war. There's always some proximate cause.
-- Dennis Meadows

No man is good enough to
govern another man without that other's consent.
-- Abraham Lincoln, October 16, 1854

Rather than worry about whether to use a disposable or a washable diaper, we should worry about whether to have the child in the first place; that's the big decision.
-- Donella Meadows

Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single 'technology' now available to the human race.
-- UNICEF

Every issue in the world today can be influenced by money. If an individual makes more money than they need, they can use it to influence the world. ... I believe the ability to create wealth is the best instrument to promote change.
-- Tony Rennier

When you can measure what you are speaking about
and express it in numbers, you know something about it,
and when you cannot measure it in numbers,
your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
-- Kelvin

Through and through the world is infected with quantity. To talk sense, is to talk in quantities.
-- Whitehead

The assertion that "all men are created equal" was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.
-- Abraham Lincoln

The most dangerous threat to our global environment may not be the strategic threats themselves but rather our perception of them, for most people do not yet accept the fact that this crisis is extremely grave.
-- Al Gore

We are not unlike the laboratory frog that, when dropped into a pot of boiling water, quickly jumps out. But when placed in lukewarm water that is slowly heated, the frog will remain there until it is rescued.
-- Al Gore

So be ideal.
-- Kevin Steele

Slightly over one billion people, less than a quarter of the world's population, live in nations whose standard of living-health, education, diet, housing, and quality of material possessions-has improved dramatically over what the vast majority of the world's population enjoyed a century ago. But some four billion people don't. They live in nations where average per-capita wealth is only about a fifteenth of that of the rich nations and where their babies are some five to twenty times as likely to die by the age of one. Of those, nearly a billion live in 'absolute poverty' -- defined as being too poor to buy enough food to maintain health or perform a job.
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion

The forces that drive dramatic changes are often large, opposing ideas that move slowly and ultimately press against one another with incredible force, like the tectonic plates responsible for continental drift and earthquakes.
-- Al Gore

People have spent a lot of time and energy analyzing what they call "computability": how easily problems can be solved. But there's another side to it: what problems should be solved. Personality can be defined by the way problems are chosen.
-- Alexander Jablokov

A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.
-- Napolean Banaparte

The very idea of an American economy is becoming meaningless, as are the notions of an American corporation, American capital, American products and American technology.
-- Robert Reich, U.S. Secretary of Labor

To say what you think will certainly damage you in society; but a free tongue is worth more than a thousand invitations.
-- Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts

Crick: All the worries about genetic engineering pale in significance with the question of what you are going to do about there being so many people in the world and the rate at which they increase.

Watson: Yes, that's what I worry about--overpopulation.
-- James Watson and Francis Crick, discoverers of DNA

Utopia is not one of the options.
-- David Bergland

It is deeply gratifying to me that my grandson is taking up the cudgels for a cause that we have long believed in -- forty years ago when Gramps first became actively involved in Soil Conservation work, all the world was pretty indifferent. Relatively, only a few were opening their eyes and minds and beginning to see and listen. Today, the wide-spread awareness of our environment, what we've been doing to it, and the deep concern of young people is very heartening. Facing the problem, each of us doing what we can will make a difference -- we will win out yet, for Nature is on our side. She has a marvelous capacity for lush renewal if only we give her a chance. The ingrained greed in much of human-kind, and our population explosion are the culprits -- the real flies in the ointment.
-- Lillian Cottrell Deibert, March 30, 1993

In Germany the Nazis came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller

The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

Learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's *demand* for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is *his* property--and loathsome as such claim might be, there's something still more loathsome: your agreement. ... If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help.
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Nationalism of this sort has, in combination with the militarism it encourages, eaten deeply down to the present day, into the spirit and consciousness of millions of people, distorting their images of external reality and of themselves, sowing a foolish and suicidal destructiveness among peoples -- peoples who are now going to require the greatest of their resources of strength to confront successfully, even in the absence of military effort and sacrifice, the social and environmental dangers by which their civilization is now assailed.
-- George F. Kennan, 1992

The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
-- Albert Einstein

Anyone who isn't confused here doesn't really understand what's going on.
-- Belfast Citizen

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-- Carl Sagan

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will exist.
-- Dwight David Eisenhower, in his farewell address, Jan. 17, 1961

Who today in our part of the world knows the opinion of a single person living in the Euphrates valley? History is written by the winners: this natural bias is one of the great protectors of unjustified optimism.
-- Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly

To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
-- Aldo Leopold

Polarization and objectivity don't mix well;
the search for truth becomes submerged
by the implicit and demanding question
"Are you with us or ag'in us?"
-- Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly

While [the public school system] is ill-regarded by everybody, the institution's right to compel its clientele to accept such dubious service is still guaranteed by the police.
-- John Taylor Gatto

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.
-- Herbert Hoover

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
-- T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

The problems to be faced are vast and complex, but come down to this: 5.5 billion people are breeding exponentially. ...

Making matters worse, we are in the middle of a once-in-a-billion-year blowout sale of hydrocarbons. They are being combusted into the atmosphere at a rate that will effectively double-glaze the planet within the next fifty years, with unknown climatic results. ...

From this perspective, recycling aluminum cans in the company cafeteria and ceremonial tree plantings are about as effective as bailing out the Titanic with teaspoons. While recycling and tree planting are good and necessary ideas, they are woefully inadequate. ... The problem isn't the half measures, but the illusion they foster that subtle course corrections can guide us to a good life that will include a "conserved" nature and cozy shopping malls.
-- Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce

Is it possible that compelling people to do something guarantees that they will do it poorly, with a bad will, or indifferently, unless you are willing, as the Army is, to suspend most human rights and use any degree of intimidation necessary?
-- John Taylor Gatto

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.
-- John Taylor Gatto

Civilization is at stake... We would be foolish to see in the Cairo conference anything less.
-- The Vatican

Is the Vatican ruling the world? Is the Vatican deciding what every country must have?

The Vatican has a population growth rate of zero, and it is in Italy, which has one of the lowest growth rates in the world. We respect the Vatican, but if they came not to negotiate, why did they come?
-- Maher Mahran, Egypt's population minister, at the 1994 Cairo conference

All too often, overpopulation is thought of simply as overcrowding: too many people in a given area, too high a population density. For instance, the deputy editor in chief of Forbes magazine pointed out recently, in connection with a plea for more population growth in the United States: "If all the people from China and India lived in the continental U.S. (excluding Alaska), this country would still have a smaller population density than England, Holland, or Belgium." The appropriate response is "So what?"
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion

To this very day, contrary to popular belief, driving remains one of the riskiest activities we perform after birth: More rock climbers today are killed or injured on the roads to Yosemite than scaling its 3,000 ft rock walls.
-- Jack Alpert

I may make you feel,
But I can't make you think.
-- Jethro Tull

...the abolition of [slavery] is not impossible. It ought never to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object.
-- Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder

[This was] a declaration beyond his own ability to fully believe and live, but that is why we have ideals... Because Jefferson could dream and articulate beyond his abilities, he was greater rather than less.
-- Reverend Peter Raible

Kids learn more from example than anything you say. I'm convinced they learn very early not to hear anything you say, but watch what you do.
-- Jane Pauley

The task upon leaving college and entering into the intricacies of a chosen discipline is to avoid being narrowed into a mere functionary of a professional specialization.
-- Rita Dove, poet laureate of the U.S. (in 1993)

Since it is impossible for one's pain to be understood with precision by someone else, it is the better part of social wisdom to be patient with misunderstanding; or the efforts even of good people will be experienced as insults.
-- Leon Wieseltier

You're never to old to do goofy stuff.
-- Ward Cleaver

Respect for the flag must be voluntary. Once people are compelled to respect a political symbol, they are no longer free... It is as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image...
-- William Kunstler, lawyer for flag burners

We Americans are an unprincipled nation, when you come down to it. Not that we're bad or anything. It's just that it's hard for us to pay attention to abstract matters when we have so many concrete matters -- cellular phones, ski boats, salad shooters, trail bikes, StairMasters, snow boards, pasta-making machines, four-door sport utility vehicles, palmcorders, rollerblade skates and CD players for our cars -- to occupy us. No wonder all the great intellectual concepts ... come from pastoral societies...
-- P.J. O'Rourke

Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.
-- John Taylor Gatto, on the public school system

Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or actually it is decided by my faceless employers. The choices are theirs, why should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
-- John Taylor Gatto, on the public school system

To be meek, patient, tactful, modest, honorable, brave, is not to be either manly or womanly; it is to be humane.
-- Jane Harrison

Means become ends. Tactics prevail over principles.
-- Al Gore

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
-- Doris Lessing

The first step towards vice
is to shroud innocent actions in mystery,
and whoever likes to conceal something
sooner or later has reason to conceal it.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)

It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
-- Jean-jacques Rousseau (1712-78)

It's the opinion of some that crops could be grown on the moon. Which raises the fear that it may not be long before we're paying somebody not to.
-- Franklin P. Jones

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error... They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away. If it be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged. Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, the potato as an article of food. Government is just as fallible, too, when it comes to systems in physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere; the government had declared it to be as flat as a trencher, and Galileo was obliged to abjure his error... It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Never cozy up with tyrants. They'll always turn on you.
-- Winston Churchill

As parents, we often spend too much time focusing on intellectual potential instead of more substantive qualities. What matters most is not how much intellect the child has, but rather what he or she decides to do with it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

That I might investigate the subject matter of this science with the same freedom of spirit we generally use in mathematics, I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them; and to this end I have looked upon passions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.
-- Spinoza, in Tractatus Politicus

We are not debating the right issues.
-- Jeremy Rifkin, May 5, 1995

What do we want the Earth to be like fifty years from now? Let's do a little dreaming and then see that this dream is not cut off at the pass. A future by design, not default.
-- David Bower

People and nations behave wisely--once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban, Israeli diplomat and writer

If you cannot afford to do it right the first time, how come you can afford to do it twice?
-- Ivar Eidsmo, master builder

We have encouraged our best thinkers to concentrate their talents not on understanding the whole but on analyzing smaller and smaller parts.
-- Vice President Al Gore

Scrooge trembled more and more. "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealing of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business."
-- from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

We can do no great things -- only small things with great love.
-- Mother Theresa

Someday, I suspect, a future time will wonder that we as an American people, living at the dawn of the 21st Century, could tolerate immense wealth side by side with hunger and homelessness.
-- Reverend Peter Raible

I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening...
-- Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
-- Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Frank could think of only two sorts of people who would speak in code: spies and criminals.
-- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

 

Quotes that I included in my Gumption Memo:

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
-- James Baldwin

The World Game: To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
-- Buckminster Fuller

No environmental problem threatens the "planet" or rates with the danger of nuclear war. No oil spill ever caused suffering on a par with today's civil war in Yugoslavia, which is a minor episode in human misery. World War II left more than 35 million dead. Cambodia's civil war resulted in 1 million or 3 million deaths. The great scourges of humanity remain what they have always been: war, natural disaster, oppressive government, crushing poverty and hate. On any scale of tragedy, environmental distress is a featherweight.
-- Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, June 1, 1992

There are occasional tragedies, such as the accidental release of poisonous gas into the air above Bhopal, India, which capture the whole world's attention. But the constant deadly levels of air pollution in cities throughout the developing world do not, even though on a "normal" day they are responsible for the deaths of more people than died at Bhopal.
-- Vice President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

People can complain about these incinerators all they want. They can argue against them, they can write to editors, but in the end, the garbage is going to win.
-- Brendan Sexton, former New York State sanitation commissioner

We can now see the rings of Saturn, the atoms of a molecule, the valves inside the human heart, and the entire earth rising above the moon's horizon. We can hear the recorded voices of speakers who have long since died, the music of whales at the bottom of the sea, and the cries of a baby trapped in an abandoned well a thousand miles away. We can walk down the aisle of a plane traveling twice the speed of sound, leave Europe at lunchtime and arrive the same day in New York for a late breakfast. We can grasp the levers of a giant crane and, like Atlas, lift the weight of a thousand men.
-- Vice President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

Think of it. ... We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, give every human on Earth a chance. We dwell instead on petty things. We kill each other. We build monuments to ourselves. What a waste of time. Think of it. What a chance we have...
-- Buckminster Fuller

Men who have both made and given away millions testify that giving intelligently is much more difficult than making a fortune. We who are not rich may find that hard to believe, but we should be impressed by overwhelming agreement among those in a position to know.
-- Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly

It's a difficult thing to do it and do it well. It's actually harder to give it away intelligently than it is to make it.
-- Ross Perot

When decision analysis was first developed, a common comment was, "If this is such a great idea, why doesn't [insert name of large, famous company] use it?" Today, it is difficult to find a major corporation that has not employed decision analysis in some form... Increasing uncertainties and rapid change require fresh solutions rather than tested "rules of thumb." Some day, decision analysis of important decisions will perhaps become recognized as so necessary for conducting a provident life that it will be taught in grade school rather than in graduate school.
-- Ronald Howard, The Evolution of Decision Analysis

The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.
-- Albert Einstein

If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
-- Rush

Remembering that one of the functions of language is to prevent thought, we easily recognize the purpose of the term "side effects": it is to discourage thinking about the total effects of a new medicine, a new pesticide, or a new public works project when some of the consequences prove embarrassing to the promoters. ...an effect is an effect is an effect. The adjective "side" is added to coerce thinking-to restrict questions to safe channels (safe for the promoter's enterprise).
-- Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly

The most important part of our way of looking, the part that is perhaps least widely shared, is our systems viewpoint... Systems training has taught us to see the world as a set of unfolding dynamic behavior patterns, such as growth, decline, oscillation, overshoot. It has taught us to focus on interconnections. We see the economy and the environment as one system. We see stocks and flows and feedbacks and thresholds in that system, all of which influence the way the system behaves.
-- Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits

When viewing the overall pattern of worldwide environmental degradation, we sometimes find it difficult to attain a sufficiently distant perspective from which to make sense of the confusing jumble of information.
-- Vice President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

I'm impressed with the reluctance of society to confront certain issues,
and the ingenuity people show
in developing a rhetorical defense against controversial concerns.
-- Garrett Hardin

[Our resistance to fallacious information] could be much enhanced if material on the human predicament were woven into basic teaching in elementary and high school, and if every college student in the nation were required to take at least one course that gave a basic overview of the "state of the planet." At Stanford University, there has been considerable uproar over the content of a required "Western Civilization" course. But most students (and most faculty) remain ignorant of the size and growth patterns of the human population, what is involved in producing food, how ecosystems provide essential services to society, the comparative deployment of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces, how people's perceptual systems give them a biased and inadequate view of the modern world, the basic theory of evolution, and the laws of thermodynamics. All these are more important to the average citizen than what Plato or Richard Wright wrote or who was gathered at the Congress of Vienna. ... The complacency with which our education system at all levels accepts the production of citizens hopelessly unequipped to understand the population explosion and many other aspects of the modern world is a national disgrace.
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H.G. Wells

The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.
-- the U.S. Bureau of Soils, 1909

If you think what exists today is permanent and forever true, you inevitably get your head handed to you.
-- John Reed, Chairman of Citicorp

It is time we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.
-- General Omar Bradley

The consumer class--the 1.1 billion members of the global consumer society... enjoy a life-style unknown in earlier ages. We dine on meat and processed, packaged foods, and imbibe soft drinks and other beverages from disposable containers. We spend most of our time in climate-controlled buildings equipped with refrigerators, clothes washers and dryers, abundant hot water...

The world's poorest billion people are unable to provide themselves with an adequate diet; perhaps half of them are so short of calories that they are likely to suffer stunted growth, mental retardation, or even death. ...they drink water that is often contaminated with human, animal, and chemical wastes. If hunger doesn't kill them, the water may: waterborne diseases account for 80 percent of illness in the Third World, according to the World Health Organization.
-- Alan Thein Durning, How Much Is Enough?

We must always also keep in mind that buried in dry statistics
about differences between rich and poor
is an enormous amount of human misery,
an endless series of almost incomprehensible tragedies.
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
-- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error... They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only... If it [free inquiry] be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged. Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, the potato as an article of food. Government is just as fallible, too, when it comes to systems in physics. Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere; the government had declared it to be as flat as a trencher, and Galileo was obliged to abjure his error... It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a passage from Notes on Virginia

Governments could go on talking from now to doomsday. We must prevent the destruction of western civilization.
-- Albert Einstein

Politicians usually figure one letter represents about a hundred constituents. People don't realize it, but ten letters to a congressman or senator or governor will often get real results.
-- David Siegel, What Is Worth Doing

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
-- Margaret Mead

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
-- Herbert Spencer

The best way to predict the future is to create it.
-- Alan Kay

We must be the change that we wish to see in the world.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life-style.
-- Pope John Paul II

In Tennessee there is an old saying: When you are in a hole, stop digging.
-- Vice President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

We have met the enemy and he is us.
-- Pogo

The single simplest and most effective thing anyone could do to save Earth is to have no more than two children.
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Healing the Planet

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.
-- Lily Tomlin

It is impossible to give the whole planet the kind of life-style you have here, that the Germans have, that the Dutch have ... and we must face this reality.
-- Jose Lutzenberger, Brazil's Secretary of State for Environment

If somebody had told me that I would become Pope one day, I would have studied harder.
-- Pope John Paul I

If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
-- Albert Einstein

If every American household (there are currently 100 million) converted all lamps to compact fluorescents, America would instantly become an energy exporting nation! ... If every human on earth replaced their incandescents with compact fluorescents we could shut down 50 nuclear power plants!
-- The Real Goods Alternative Energy Sourcebook, 1991

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
-- Sir Winston Churchill

[The U.S. government] should replace every light bulb with one of the new long-life bulbs that consume only a fraction as much electricity to produce the same amount of light.
-- Vice President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

Family planning is a controversial subject in some countries. In the `60s and `70s, it was very difficult to discuss, but if you discuss it in health terms, family planning is generally not controversial because it is so important for the health of women and the survival of children.

...the world population crisis which was identified in the `60s really can be essentially overcome if sufficient resources are made available over the next two decades. I think the next two decades are critical: the `90s and the first decade of the next century. And resources are key.
-- Steven Sinding, Population Adviser at the World Bank and former Director of the Office of Population at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

Limiting human numbers will not alone end warfare, environmental deterioration, poverty, racism, religious prejudice, or sexism; it will just buy us the opportunity to do so.
-- Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion

The groundwork for the great social movements of the past was laid through many years of searching, intellectual interchange, social experimentation, collective action, organization, and struggle. The same will be true of the coming stages of social change.
-- Noam Chomsky

The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.
-- Albert Einstein

My country is the world and my religion is to do good.
-- Thomas Paine

I stared across the arroyo at the runoff which was cascading down the opposite bank. The entire bank was washing away but the areas held together by grass were eroding more slowly than the unprotected bare areas. This slower erosion turned the clumps of grass into high points which diverged the runoff around them. Many clumps eventually washed down the slope and disappeared in the brown flood below. Yet for as long as each clump of grass remained, it created a divergence which reduced the energy of the cascade. Even if the grass was washed away, it had reduced erosion during the time it stood. If those plants had not been growing on the side of the arroyo, the erosion would have been worse.

I am like the grass, I thought. My efforts prevent the erosion from being worse. Even if the flood washes my efforts away, my resistance will have absorbed some of the flood's energy and lessened the erosion that would have otherwise happened. Whether my efforts are enough to "win" depends upon the force I oppose. If the force is small enough, I shall "win." If it is large enough, I "lose." To be proud of "winning" is to be proud of encountering a force smaller than myself. I should forget about "winning" and, like the grass, simply resist the erosion.
-- Paul Krapfel, Shifting

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