• I really hope these quotes inspire you to reflect and to take sustainable action. – Jen xx
• Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word ‘success.’ – David Wann
• What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. – Mahatma Gandhi
•  Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man. – Stewart Udall
•  Buy less, choose well, make it last. – Vivienne Westwood
• You have to hold yourself accountable for your actions, and that’s how we’re going to protect the Earth. – Julia Butterfly Hill
•  The most sustainable way is to not make things. The second most sustainable way is to make something very useful, to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved. – Thomas Sigsgaard
•  Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. – Aldo Leopold
•  A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
• 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
• We can’t just consume our way to a more sustainable world. – Jennifer Nini
•  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. – Chief Seattle, 1854
•  Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive,, and even spiritual satisfaction. – Dr. Edward O. Wilson
•  The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally. – Dalai Lama
•  An act of violence against nature should be judged as severely as that against society or another person. – Dr. Michael W.Fox
•  Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge. – Thomas Edison
•  He that plants trees love others besides himself. – Thomas Fuller
•  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. – Rachel Carson
•  In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. – Paul Brooks
• How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? – Charles A. Lindbergh
•  It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. – Ansel Adams
•  The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. – Carl Sagan
•  There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more. – Gaylord Nelson
•  In our rich consumers’ civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions. – Max Lerner
•  Our life is frittered away by detail…Simplify, simplify, simplify! Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. – Henry Thoreau

•  Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world. – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
•  People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. – Ha-Joon Chang
•  Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans. – George Holland
• We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. – Thomas Fuller
•  When the soil disappears, the soul disappears. – Ymber Delecto
•  Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance. – Yvon Chouinard
•  A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things – including man. All life forms obey Nature’s demands – except man, who has found ways of ignoring them. – Eugene M. Poirot
•  For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. – Rachel Carson
• Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites. – William Ruckelshaus
•  We can never have enough of Nature. – Henry David Thoreau
•  All I want is to stand in a field and to smell green, to taste air, to feel the earth want me, Without all this concrete hating me. – Phillip Pulfrey
•  Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them. – Albert Einstein
•  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
•  How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. – Anne Frank
• I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do. – Edward Everett Hale
•  Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations. – Jean Paul Richter
•  Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. – Cree Indian Proverb
•  The greatest danger to our future is apathy. – Jane Goodall
•  Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed. – Mahatma Ghandi
•  We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. – Howard Zinn
•  Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. – Pope John Paul II

• 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 first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them. – Paul Hawken
•  It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival. – Cameron Sinclair
•  Unless we are willing to encourage our children to reconnect with and appreciate the natural world, we can’t expect them to help protect and care for it. – David Suzuki
•  Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers. – Peter Singer
•  “Consume less; share better.” – Hervé Kempf
•  Be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi
•  The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible. – Edward O. Wilson
•  We are not above nature, we are a part of nature. – Jennifer Nini
•  You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. – Jane Goodall
•  The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it. – Robert Swan

Sustainability and Green Living Quotes

• “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.” ― Terence McKenna
• “Ending is better than mending.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• “It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.” ― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
• “We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet, with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” ― Paul Newman
• “People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.” ― Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
• “To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I — or does anyone else — have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?” ― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
• “Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers” ― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
• “The pressure of adversity is the most powerful sustainer of accountability. It’s as though everything you do is multiplied by 50 in order to surpass those with a head-start. I was never capable of slacking when at the threshold of failure.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
• “Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.” ― George Washington Carver
• “We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.” ― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

• “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” ― Albert A. Bartlett
• tags: exponential-growth, humanity, life, science, sustainability, sustainable-development
• “Live at home” ― George Washington Carver
• “We need to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met and never will.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs
• “Consume less; share better.” ― Hervé Kempf
• “The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.” ― Edward O. Wilson
• “Love tames the benumbed beast. A man is put to use regarding a woman’s physical safety, but a woman is put to use regarding a man’s mental safety.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy
• “The more stitches, the fewer riches.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• “All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.” ― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
• “Alas, our technology has marched ahead of our spiritual and social evolution, making us, frankly, dangerous people.” ― Steven M. Greer
• “If we are going to start calling industrial corn sustainable, then we might as well say that petroleum is a renewable resource if you’re willing to wait long enough.” ― Catherine Friend, Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old Macdonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat
• “For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction.” ― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
• “When we use these words and we talk about plants having a strategy to do this or wanting this or desiring this, we’re being metaphorical obviously. I mean, plants do not have consciousness. But, this is a fault of our own vocabulary. We don’t have a very good vocabulary to describe what other species do to us because we think we’re the only species that really do anything.” ― Michael Pollan
• “If you can’t reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop a sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order? We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences — which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef — and yet we don’t think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.” ― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
• “This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.” ― David Mackay, Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air
• “The energy and daring are to resist the noes until the final yes has been achieved.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs
• “Manufacturers have long chosen plastic for their products on the basis of price and functionality., But creating a more sustainable relationship with plastics will require a new dexterity on our part. It will require us to think about the entire life cycle of the products we create and use.” ― Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story
• “‘Comply’ is not a vision”  – Ray Anderson, founder of Interface
• “I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” – Paul Newman, actor
• “Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.” – George Monbiot
• “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter Drucker, management consultant
• “The future will be green, or not at all.” – Jonathan Porritt, environmentalist and author
• “Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.” – Naomi Klein, author
• “Science always uses metaphor.” – James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory
• “If you ask the wrong question, of course, you get the wrong answer. We find in design it’s much more important and difficult to ask the right question. Once you do that, the right answer becomes obvious.” – Amory Lovins, physicist, environmental scientist, and writer
• “Being a good human being is good business.” – Paul Hawken, environmentalist, entrepreneur, and writer
• “I’m not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.” – James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory