Sustainability & Sustainable Lifestyle Quotes

“Fundamentally, sustainable development is a notion of discipline. It means humanity must ensure that meeting present needs does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.“
Gro Harlem Brundtland

"Action is the foundational key to all success."
Pablo Picasso

"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
Leonardo da Vinci

"Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
Salvador Dali

"Future generation is the most important thing.”
Confucius

"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced"
Kierkegaard

“Sustainable development is a dynamic process which enables all people to realise their potential, and to improve their quality of life, in ways which simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth's life support systems.”
(Forum for the Future Annual Report 2000).

“Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further developments.”
Lewis Mumford

“Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. ”
Albert Einstein

“There are two posible routes to affluence. Either produce much, or desire little. ”
Anon.

"If everyone on the world enjoyed the same level of natural resource consumption as a typical UK citizen, we would need three planets to support us. This is clearly unsustainable. ”
www.bioregional.com

"Uncommon men require no common trust; give him but scope and he will set the bounds"
Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

"Commodities, including parcels of time, only accrue value if and when they are rendered scarce. Time scarcity has been a basic principle of industrial life."
Andrew Ross

"The wise man doesn’t give the right answers - he poses the right questions."
Claude Levi Strauss

"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

"He who would travel happily must travel lightly."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age."
Jacques Barzun

"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
Marcel Proust

"Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on."
Kevin Kelly

"Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you."
Elias Canetti

"Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium."
Cyril Connolly

"Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table."
Alan Cooper

"Do less, with less."
Viridian Design Manifesto

"Some people say complexity is 'out of control'. But not knowing how to reach a destination is one thing — having no destination at all is another, more wretched, thing."
John Thackara

"For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role."
Marshall Mc Luhan

"We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end."
Lewis Mumford

"Don’t follow trends - start trends."
Frank Capra

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world."
Albert Camus

"In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation."
Victor Papanek

"Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it arises out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life’s further developments."
Lewis Mumford

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."
Henry Miller

"A wise man changes his mind; a fool never will."
Spanish Proverb

"If you want to build a ship, teach the men to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
Saint Exupery

"We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people."
- Mikhail Gorbachev

"We share the earth not only with our fellow human beings, but with all the other creatures."
- The Dalai Lama

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
- Albert Einstein

"We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to."
- Terri Swearingen

"Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant."
- Aldous Huxley

"The best friend of earth 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

"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."
- Galileo

"You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled."
- Tahanie

"We are seeing the birth of a new perspective of the world, where ecology and economics are two sides of the same coin."
- Leif Johansson

"We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us. "
- E.F. Schumacher

"Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness'."
- Luther Standing Bear

"If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed."
- Chinese Proverb

"The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years."
- Jacques Cousteau

"Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food."
- Hippocrates

"If we use fuel to get our power, we are living on our capital and exhausting it rapidly. This method is barbarous and wantonly wastefull. A far better way would be to avail ourselves of the sun's rays."
- Nikola Tesla

"We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on earth. We need to change people's perceptions. If there's no environment, there's no human race. We are in a state of global denial. "
- Ted Turner

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
- Mahatma Gandhi

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
- Marshall McLuhan

"We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking."
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Indian Prophecy

"The continued poverty of the majority of the planet’s inhabitants and excessive consumption by the minority are the two major causes of environmental degradation."
- UN Environment Program

"A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent."
- E. F. Schumacher

"Everyone who considers themselves a realist will be forced to justify their behavior in light of their contribution toward the preservation of the environment."
- Ernst von Weizacker

"For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the 'more with less' technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful."
- Buckminster Fuller

"The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous and enduring and thus more intelligent, even competitive."
- Paul Hawken

"We have forgotten who we are, we have lost our sense of wonder and connectedness, we have degraded the earth and our fellow creatures, and we have nowhere else to go . . . "
- Earth Charter

"All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait 'til oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
- Thomas Edison

"The boundless blue-sky, the ocean which gives us breath and protects us from the endless black and death, is but an infinitesimally thin film."
- Vladimir Shatalov - Cosmonaut

"The only people in the suburbs who like what's happening are the developers, who are getting rich. "
- Myron Orfield

"Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment."
- Rene Dubos

"Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something."
- Carl Sagan

"That each day I may walk unceasingly on the banks of my water, that my soul may repose on the branches of the trees which I planted. "
- Egyptian tomb inscription

"If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror."
- John Young, former Apollo astronaut

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

"The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built. "
- Frank Lloyd Wright

"The time will come when men will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"Our world has enough for each person's need, but not for his greed."
- Mahatma Gandhi

"We all moan and groan about the loss of the quality of life through the destruction of our ecology, and yet each one of us, in our own little comfortable ways, contributes daily to that destruction. It's time now to awaken in each one of us the respect and attention our beloved mother deserves."
- Ed Asner

"The world's deteriorating ecology poses as great a danger to mankind today as did the nuclear standoff between the superpowers at the height of the Cold War."
- Mikhail Gorbachev

"Out of clutter ... find simplicity. From discord . . . find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. "
- Albert Einstein

"Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the people of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it."
- Chief Seattle

"Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man."
- Stewart Udall

"The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done -- challenging us to a realization of a new humanity. "
- Jean Houston

"Less is more."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"We are each as much a part of the environment as a tree is. The ecosphere is an interconnected web (like the Internet)."
- Matt Howes

"Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge. "
- Thomas Edison

"The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. "
- Luther Standing Bear

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following:

There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 Africans

_
52 would be female
48 would be male
_
70 would be non-white
30 would be white
_
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
_
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
_
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from
the United States.
_
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

The following is also something to ponder...

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation ...you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If your parents are still alive and still married ... you are very rare, even in the United States and Canada.

If you can read this message, you just received a double blessing in that someone was thinking of you, and furthermore, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read at all.

"I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies."
Le Corbusier

"Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep."
Le Corbusier

"God is in the details."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good."
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew - Marshall McLuhan

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it - President Lyndon Johnson (on signing of the Wilderness Act, 1964)

Even though the relationship between economic growth, wellbeing and human happiness is tricky territory, it is territory that should no longer be avoided, if richer no longer means better, or happier - UK Sustainable Development Commission (2003)

An essential way to maintain high and stable levels of growth without severe social or environmental damage is to improve our resource productivity - UK Sustainable Development Commission (2003)

Confronting consumption, seeking to influence consumer behaviour, and understanding the process of lifestyle change are increasingly important topics for sustainable development - UK Sustainable Development Commission (2003)

A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions - Luke 19:20

Joy is not in things, it is in us - Jess Lair

Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction - Albert Einstein

Kindly leave this planet as you would wish to find it - source not known

Think Global, Act Local - source not known

The environment is everything else except me - Albert Einstein

There are two certainties in life: "Death" and "Waste Production" - source unknown

The future has no shelf life - Warren Bennis, Professor of Business Administration, University of Southern California

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed - William Gibson (author)

The future isn't what it used to be - Arthur C Clarke

The past does not equal the future - Anthony Robbins

The past is another country, they do things differently there - opening words to "The Go-Between" (1953), L P Hartley 1895-1972

We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present - Adlai E Stevenson

You never reach the promised land. You can march towards it - James Callaghan

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there - Charles F. Kettering, American inventor (1876-1958)

Today's problems cannot be solved if we still think the way we thought when we created them - Albert Einstein

There must be a better way to make the things we want, a way that doesn't spoil the sky, or the rain or the land - Sir Paul McCartney

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet - Carl Sagan

The best way to predict the future...is to create it - source unknown

Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now - Alan Lakein

Who heeds not the future will find sorrow at hand - Confucius

Treat the Earth as though we intend to stay here - Sir Crispin Tickell, 1998

We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to - Terri Swearingen

Take care of the things that take care of you - source unknown

Woe to those who add house to house, who join field to field, until there is no more room and they are the sole inhabitants of the land - Isaiah 5:8

A man reaps what he sows - Galations 6:7

Nothing in excess - Greek proverb

Our tools are better than we are, and grow faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it - Aldo Leopold

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the pieces - Lord May, President of the Royal Society, January 2003

There are two possible routes to affluence. Either produce much, or desire little - source unknown

The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves - Rachel Carson

Taken together, our efforts are like drops of dew that slowly accumulate in the soul of the world, hastening the day when the entire Earth, with all its peoples and creatures, will enjoy harmony and fulfilment - Guy Dauncey

Sustainable living on the planet: We have to learn to live simply to allow others to simply live - source unknown

The world is a sacred vessel. It should not be meddled with. It should not be owned. If you try to meddle with it you will ruin it. If you try to own it you will lose it - Lao Tzu

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough - Lao Tzu

He is not poor that has little, but he who desires much - proverb

You cannot have everything. I mean, where would you put it? - Steven Wright

Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty - Socrates (469-399 BC)

Irritations of the eyes, which are caused by smoke, over-heating, dust, or similar injury, are easy to heal; the patient being advised first of all to avoid the irritating causes... For the disease ceases without the use of any kind of medicine, if only a proper way of living be adopted - Aetios (c.AD 535)

Live as if you'll die tomorrow, but farm as if you'll live forever - farming proverb

Environmental impact = population + the level of affluence + technical efficiency. - Paul Ehrlich (1968)

The air, the water and the ground are free gifts to man and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore each man has a right to his share of each - James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851)

Treat the Earth well. It is not inherited from your parents, it is borrowed from your children - old Kenyan proverb

The closer we get to a virtuous circle, in which our work, our home life, our ethics and our spirituality are mutually reinforcing, the closer we will be to achieving genuine sustainability - James Wilsdon, Senior Researcher, Forum for the Future, 1999

I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell - Vandana Shiva (physicist, ecologist, activist, editor and writer)

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little - Edmund Burke, Whig MP for Bristol 1774-80

The new energy future is decentralised, entrepreneurial and needs people like you to say 'Give me a clean car, give me solar shingles to put on my roof - give me a clean future' - Bill Clinton (2003)

The 21st Century is likely to become the solar-hydrogen-energy efficiency century - Charles Secrett, Friends of the Earth

The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it - Adair Turner, Vice Chairman, Merrill Lynch (addressing The Inaugural Carbon Trust Lecture, London, April 2003)

21st Century choice: Look after our planet and it will look after us, or don't and face the consequences - unattributable

If civilization has risen from the stone age, it can rise again from the wastepaper age - Jacques Barzun

Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that seems abstract - sustainable development - and turn it into a reality for all the world's people - Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General

A world where one tenth of the population gets to be extremely wealthy, and six tenths very poor, is not, in the long run, a stable place - Bill McKibben

The wealthiest 300 people have greater riches than the three billion poorest. The three wealthiest people have greater riches than the 48 poorest countries put together. With only limited environmental space to accommodate the expected 9 billion human inhabitants of the world by 2050, such disparities in consumption are clearly not sustainable - Tony Juniper, Executive Director, Friends of the Earth (2003)

The loss of biodiversity threatens the survival of some of the world's poorest people and closes down options for sustainable development in the future - Professor Peter Crane, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2002)

There is a clear connection between population growth and virtually every challenge facing our planet - Population Connection

Living in an orgy of unrestrained consumption and economic growth accompanied by population expansion that ignores the carrying capacity of local environments will lead to disaster - unattributable

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day. The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it. It is in bad shape - Life, The Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams

Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment - Sir David Attenborough

The only real form of pollution is people. Any ecological system which does not include the reduction or stopping of growth of the population is eyewash - Professor Heinz Wolf (1999 UK Innovation Lecture, Bournemouth)

You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled - Tahanie

Trying to relieve traffic congestion by building more roads is like trying to lose weight by loosening your belt - source unknown

Why should [students] worry about the 90 million annual increase in the world's population, the 400 million unemployed in the 'South', ozone depletion, drought, famine and poverty? There is one very obvious reason. Anyone over the age of 50, given reasonable good luck, can expect life to go on much as it is now until we achieve our generous life expectancy. Those between 20 and 50 will need unusually good luck for that to happen and anyone under 20 has no chance at all. Something is going to have to change... - George Walker, Head/International School, Geneva (2002)

"To free all of humanity, and above all our children and grandchildren, from the threat of living on a planet irredeemably spoilt by human activities, and whose resources would no longer be sufficient for their needs" - goal set by world leaders for World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, August/September 2002

Building a world where we meet our own needs without denying future generations a healthy society is not impossible, as some would assert. The question is where societies choose to put their creative efforts - Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch Institute President, January 2003

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy - John Sawhill

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life - Dalai Lama

Climate is an angry beast and we are poking at it with sticks - Wallace Broecker, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, New York (2003)

At its starkest, those facing the greatest impact of climate change are least responsible - 'the effect' magazine, The Tyndall Centre, 2003

How vulnerable communities can best adapt to changing climate is both a practical and a moral issue for the international community - Dr Neil Adger, The Tyndall Centre, 2003

The impacts of global warming are such that I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction - Sir John Houghton, former Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office, 2003

Human history is a race between education and catastrophe - H G Wells


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