Frances Moore Lappé Quotes

I had no identity [when I was 27] - I was terrified that somebody would ask me what I was doing, and I would have no answer.

Democracy is not what we have. It is what we do.

I was a compulsive eater in my late teens and until I wrote Diet for a Small Planet, so I know what it feels like when food becomes a threat.

How we frame the world - how we talk about it and define it - affects how we see things and how we live.

Fear doesn't have to stop us.

What has dawned on me is that focusing on the "finite planet" frame sends a message that we have gone as far as Nature can take us and therefore we need to give power to forces outside Nature.

Fear doesn't necessarily mean that we have to stop. It doesn't mean that we are failures. It doesn't mean that we are cowards.

We can't see ahead of time what actions are going to be the ones that move history in dramatic ways.

I never like to use those terms [like pessimistic].

With organic approaches, women - who have been gardeners for millennia and mothers forever - can rise because of their intimate knowledge of nature.

No society has fulfilled its democratic promise if people go hungry... If some go without food they have surely been deprived of all power. The existence of hunger belies the existence of democracy.

Nature is with us if we can learn how to align with it and not break the basic laws that generate life.

The good life is not about avoiding fear. Just the opposite.

If we cannot know what's possible, then we are free to do that which is pulling our hearts and that which is life serving.

Breaking with the pack may be exactly what we should be doing. Saying "no" to the dominant culture that is trapping us in destructive ways of living might be the most life-serving thing we can do.

When we say we have "hit the limits," we are saying that nature is the problem, when in fact the limits we have hit are the limits of destruction and waste, not nature.

My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.

We evolved to be problem-solvers, to create, to be choosers of our own future!

A life-long mission has been to counter the notion that political engagement is the spinach we must eat in order to have the dessert of freedom.

That's what happened when my own life crumbled. The people who came into my life bolstered me to take more risks, to be even more true to myself.

Old models of farming with chemicals and credit mostly favored privileged men.

The problem is that our whole tribe - if you will, the larger community of humanity itself - is on a death march ecologically and in terms of the intensification of violence and conflict.

If we start with "limits" and a premise of scarcity and fear, it makes us fearful of each other, and that makes us vulnerable to anti-democratic systems.