"I feel that what women can offer to the wilderness is concern and care. The more people who love something, the more chance that something has to survive. If you learn to enjoy a walk in the woods more than an afternoon in a shopping center, you’ll be willing to fight to keep precious undeveloped areas, especially near population centers, from going under concrete." — Maggie Nichols via Anne LaBastille Women and Wilderness
"If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war…Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy." — Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
"You want weapons? We’re in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world!" — 10th Doctor Doctor Who, "Tooth and Claw"
"We are led to believe we can have it if we try hard enough or spend enough, whatever "it" is. We are encouraged to believe that we can be free, but free of what? And through the influence of a common turn of modern political thought, many of us have come to believe if we don't get "it," no one is to blame but ourselves." — Nick Bullock Alpinist Magazine, Issue 68, "Less Rich Without You"
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." — Edward Abbey The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
"The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending." — Naomi Kline This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want. … Nostalgia for an earlier ignorance is not the domain of this discussion." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonder
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering." — 4th Doctor Doctor Who, "The Face of Evil"
"Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." — Malcolm Forbes
"Don’t hate what you don’t understand." — John Lennon
"There is a vast difference between [ideas and ideologies]; ideas question and liberate, whereas ideologies justify and dictate." — Paul Hawken A Passion for This Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Explore Our Relationship with Nature and the Environment, "The Ecologist"
"Television news is driven by compelling visuals, not by the intrinsic importance of the story being cast. Complicated, nonphotogenic issues requiring any considerable background information (global warming, for example) get left out of the running every time. Meanwhile, viewers are lured into assuming, at least subconsciously, that this ‘news’ is a random sampling of everything that happened on planet earth that day, and so represents reality." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonder
"What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them." — Toni Morrison New York Times Magazine, 1994, "Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison"
"Decisions are best made by the people affected by them." — Gloria Steinem My Life on the Road
"The most dangerous worldview is the view of those who have never looked at the world." — Alexander von Humboldt
"One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill." — Edward Abbey A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
"Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all this: politicians aren’t the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass movements of regular people can declare one too." — Naomi Kline This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil." — Yvon Chouinard Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
"To do good, you actually have to do something." — Yvon Chouinard American Express commercial
"You’re not gonna be able to reverse history—but you can change what the future looks like for sure." — Brandon Belcher For the Love of Climbing, Episode 17, "What We Know"
