Quotations
All of these quotations have some relevance to environmental issues and the concept of sustainability. Some offer words of wisdom or inspiration, and a few are humorous. Enjoy them, pass them along, and feel free to add your favorite quotation(s) in the Comments.
“The best way to predict the future is to design it.”
- Buckminster Fuller
“The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
- Benjamin Franklin, paraphrasing a Thomas Fuller quotation
“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is today.”
- Chinese proverb
“Always do right. That will gratify some of the people and astonish the rest.”
- Mark Twain
“We should all be concerned about the future because we have to spend the rest of our lives there.”
- Francis Kettering
“Don’t find fault; find a remedy.”
– Henry Ford
“I always wondered why somebody doesn’t do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.”
– Lily Tomlin
“The best things in life aren’t things.”
- Art Buchwald
“The trouble with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
- Lily Tomlin
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.”
- Beba Dioum
“Destroying rain forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
- Edward O. Wilson
“The packaging for a microwaveable dinner is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill dead-time of centuries.”
- David Wann
“If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.”
- Barry Commoner
“The major problems in the world are the result of the differences between the way nature works and the way people think.”
- Gregory Bateson
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
- Albert Einstein
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
– Andy Warhol
“Nobody made a bigger mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
– Edmund Burke
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
- Voltaire
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
- Lao Tzu
“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”
– Marian Wright Edelman
“We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… We must do that which we think we cannot.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
“Slight not what’s near, when aiming at what’s far.”
- Euripides
“What after all has maintained the human race on this old globe, despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not the faith in new possibilities and the courage to advocate them.”
– Jane Addams
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.”
– John F. Kennedy
“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”
- Robert F. Kennedy
“The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.”
– Norman Cousins
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
- Albert Einstein
“For those who think that business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist.”
- Ray Anderson
“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”
- Ingrid Berman
“For every problem there is a solution that is simple, clean, and wrong.”
- Henry Louis Mencken
“Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
- Albert Einstein
“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.”
- Jonathan Kozol
“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something 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.”
– Lyndon B. Johnson
“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”
- Robert Byrne
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
- William James
“Common sense is seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be.”
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it matters most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
– Haile Selassie
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
– Margaret Mead
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. …I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“There is no shame in not knowing; the shame lies in not finding out.”
– Russian proverb
