The love of power sets limits. The power of love is infinite.
–Mel King
We have to understand the myths about ‘liberty and justice for all,’ otherwise we will be here in this same place, 100 years from today.
–Mel King
The universal patterns and principles the cosmos uses to build stable, healthy, and sustainable systems throughout the real world can and must be used as a model for economic-system design.
–John Fullerton
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
–Richard Buckminster Fuller
In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.
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Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?
–adrienne maree brown
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.
–Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.
–Martin Luther King Jr.
If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
–Lao Tzu
There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.
–Donella Meadows
Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.
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Evolution is not about design or will; it is the outcome of constant endeavors made by organisms that want to survive and better themselves. The collective result is intoxicatingly beautiful, rife with oddities, and surprisingly brilliant, yet no agent is in control. Evolution arises from the bottom up–so, too, does hope.
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Vision is the blazing campfire around which people will gather. It provides light, energy, warmth and unity.
–Bill Newman
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
–Alan Watts
If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.
–Howard Zinn
Few people have the imagination for reality.
–Goethe
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
—Audre Lorde
Exploitative and degenerative cultures tend to have economic systems focused around notions of scarcity and competitive advantage, whereas regenerative cultures understand how collaborative advantage can foster shared abundance.
–Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures
Nurturing qualitative growth through the integration of diversity into interconnected collaborative networks at and across local, regional and global scales facilitates the emergence of regenerative cultures.>
–Daniel Christian Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work
–Mary Oliver
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress.
Getting the economic wind behind our backs instead of always in our face, making the economic force of gravity work to build local food and local energy systems, is incredibly important and it’s very much the same work as trying to slow down this ruinous climate change.
–Bill McKibben, 350.org
Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
–Helen Keller
By opposing something we maintain it.
–Ursula Le guin
This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not from the action of a conforming majority. But, from the creative maladjustment of a transformed minority.
–Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love
People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
–Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
–Robert F. Kennedy, March 18, 1968
The time has come for global action to build a new world economic system that is no longer based on the illusion that limitless growth is possible on our precious and finite planet or that endless material gain promotes well-being. Instead, it will be a system that promotes harmony and respect for nature and for each other; that respects our ancient wisdom traditions and protects our most vulnerable people as our own family, and that gives us time to live and enjoy our lives and to appreciate rather than destroy our world. It will be an economic system, in short, that is fully sustainable and that is rooted in true, abiding well-being and happiness.
–Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley of Bhutan, where the government tracks the nation’s “Gross National Happiness”
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty–power is ever stealing from the many to the few… The hand entrusted with power becomes… the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
–Wendell Phillips, abolitionist, 1852
Despite Democratic control over the White House, despite Democratic control over the Senate, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, a small minority of the members of the Republican-controlled House have successfully pushed an extreme right-wing agenda onto the American political landscape. It is an ideology which believes that despite the fact that the rich are getting richer, the middle class is shrinking, and poverty is increasing, all – all of the burden for deficit reduction should rest on working people.
–Independent Senator Bernie Sanders on the debt ceiling “deal”
It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can ever be nearly approximated.
–“Fighting Bob” La Follette, 1924 Progressive Party candidate for President
The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.
–Phillip Blond
It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.
–Richard Buckminster Fuller, The Wellspring of Reality
We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn’t mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.
–Richard Buckminster Fuller, Only Integrity is Going to Count
I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we’re really qualified to take on the responsibility we’re designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?
–Richard Buckminster Fuller, Only Integrity is Going to Count
In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
–Eric Hoffer
I am passionate about everything in my life–first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.
–bell hooks
The liberal thing
–Deval Patrick, asked what he thought was the biggest misconception about him (Boston Globe, 11/12/2006)
There are many possible mechanisms for limiting growth. That current growth rates of population and industrialization will stop is inevitable. Unless we choose favorable processes to limit growth, the social and environmental systems by their internal processes will choose for us. The natural mechanisms for terminating exponential growth appear the least desirable. Unless the world understands and begins to act soon, civilization will be overwhelmed by forces we have created but can no longer control.
–Jay Forrester, Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems
The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests–banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex–sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.
–Micah Sifry, on President Obama’s first year in office
While the electoral system presents serious obstacles, the far bigger obstacle in the US has been the unwavering commitment of the leaders of labor, peace, and environmental organizations to the Democrats who consistently betray their progressive goals. We can end these self-inflicted defeats through independent political action.
–Howie Hawkins, former Green Party candidate for US Senate
The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe.
–Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
¡Cuan superior es la suma de las luces a la suma de las riquezas! How superior is the amount of light to the sum of wealth!
–Simón Bolívar
Only one species on earth does not have full employment and that is Homo sapiens.
–Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest
A zero-waste society means wasting nothing, and foremost among these resources are people, especially children.
–Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest
Picture the collective presence of all human beings as an organism. Pervading that organism are intelligent activities, humanity’s immune response to resist and heal the effects of political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation, whether they are the result of free-market, religious, or political ideologies.
–Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest
Who would have thought that with a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. and with a Democratic administration in Massachusetts, federal incentives could be used to move Massachusetts toward more privatization in public education, chain-run charter schools, less public accountability, more attacks on collective bargaining, and less due process for teachers? All this appears in the bill passed by the Massachusetts Senate as the Education Reform Act of 2009.
–Marilyn J. Segal, Executive Director, Citizens For Public Schools
Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places?and there are so many?where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
–Howard Zinn
I want to put out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.
–President Barack Obama, April 2, 2010
We had this incredibly rich relationship that we built with the grass-roots network the last time. And then we got in, and we let it go. And there are reasons for that. But I think it’s a terrible thing. We missed it. I missed it personally. And I think a lot of the folks in the organization missed it.
–Governor Deval Patrick, to a room of supporters, trying to reignite the grassroots, February 2010
One thing I learned in the course of the [2006] campaign is there’s too little love companies here feel from the government.
–Governor Deval Patrick, January 2007
Many before me have gone to jail for justice, and if we are going to achieve our vision, many after me will have to join me as well.
–Tim DeChristopher, Bidder 70
The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
–Senator Barack Obama, December 2007
Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.
–Howard Zinn, Memorial Day, 1976
The sad reality is that we are in danger of perishing from our own stupidity and lack of personal responsibility to life. If we become extinct because of factors beyond our control, then we can at least die with pride in ourselves, but to create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality.
–Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual
Stewardship means, for most of us, find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there. The tiresome but tangible work of school boards, county supervisors, local foresters, local politics, even while holding in mind the largest scale of potential change. Get a sense of workable territory. Learn about it and start acting point by point. On all levels, from national to local, the need to move toward steady state economy, equilibrium, dynamic balance, inner growth stressed must be taught – maturity, diversity, climax, creativity.
–Gary Snyder, Turtle Island
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
–Gregory Bateson
The only way out is spiritual, intellectual, and emotional revolution in which, finally, we learn to experience first hand the interloping connections between person and person, organism and organism, action and consequence.
–Gregory Bateson
Increase is different from growth, because you don’t want the size of the system to grow, but you want the relationships within the system, the exchange within the system, that needs to increase. And you can increase that quite infinitely.
–Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk
People today will mostly focus on the points of connection, the nodes of interest like stars in the sky. But the real understanding comes in the spaces in-between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points.
–Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk
It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network.
–Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
–Alice Walker
Life creates conditions conducive to life.
–Janine Benyus