George Monbiot Quotes

August 28th 2012. Remember that date. It marks the day when the world went raving mad.

Nobody ever rioted for austerity.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.

Like other lifeforms, we [humans] exist only to replicate ourselves.

Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.

Faced with a choice between the survival of the planet and a new set of matching tableware, most people would choose the tableware.

Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth's capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.

Thinking like ethical people, dressing like ethical people, decorating our homes like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people.

If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity.

Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.

Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.

Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.

It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more.

It does not matter whether we burn fossil fuels with malice or with love. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it is not concerned. It is a collection of gases.

Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.

Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?

All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.

War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything goes with it.

Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead.