Quote collection
425 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis."
"The climate, financial and national security crises are all connected. They share the same cause: Our [the USA's] absurd dependency on foreign oil. As long as we need to spend billions of dollars each year to buy foreign oil from state-run oil companies in the Persian Gulf, our problems of a trade deficit, a budget deficit and a climate crisis will persist."
"The cost reductions for renewable energy continue downward in a very dramatic way. We're in the early stages of a sustainability revolution in the globe that has the scale of the industrial revolution but the speed of the digital revolution. And you see it with renewable energy and you see it with LED lighting, which takes a fraction of the energy for the existing bulbs. All new lights are going to be LED. Electric vehicles. There are a lot of changes underway right now. I'm excited by the prospect, and I look forward to working in the months and years to come to accelerate this transition."
"American democracy is in grave danger from the changes in the environment in which ideas either live and spread or wither and die."
"There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party. I understand that. But that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News, and turned into a stocking horse for the right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on the country for a long time."
"When it comes to climate, we can all make a big difference. At the most basic level, don't let denial go unchallenged and win the conversation on climate."
"I had a detailed plan for my life, but it turned out life had a completely different plan for me. And I feel joy that I have work that feels like it justifies pouring everything I have into it. I never have fallen prey to the illusion that there's any job with as much ability to influence the future as that of President of the United States, but I do feel grateful that I found other ways to do work that serves the public interest."
"We're still putting 110 million tons of man-made global pollution into the air every single day as if the sky is an open sewer. More than 90% of the extra heat energy is going into the oceans, and that's why superstorm Sandy was so much more destructive, that's why the ice is melting more rapidly, that's why the water cycle is being disrupted and we get a lot more water vapor coming from the oceans into the sky, and that's why we get these enormous downpours and big floods. They happen all the time. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation."
"Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving: most of the scientists I spoke with assume we'll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade."
"The cumulative amount of man-made global pollution that's in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy every day as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day. It's a big planet, but that's an awful lot of energy."
"You're going to see new processes that utilize waste as the source of energy, so there's no petroleum consumed in the process - that makes the energy balance uniformly positive."
"And nobody is talking about taking guns away from hunters or sportsmen or banning all guns. Nobody is talking about that."
"The golden thread of reason that used to be stretched taut to mark the boundary between the known and the unknown is now routinely disrespected."
"There is the natural tendency that all of us are vulnerable to, to deny unpleasant realities and to look for any excuse to push them away and resolve to think about them another day long in the future."
"This is by far the most serious crisis civilisation has ever faced."
"I've learned the importance of changing people's minds at the grassroots level so that whoever does run will have a much better chance of encountering public opinion that reaches a critical mass and brings about a change not only in White House policies but in the Congress and in the state legislatures and all around the world."
"There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form."
"I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'"
"I'm not a vegetarian, but I have cut back sharply on the meat that I eat."
"I have faith in the United States and our ability to make good decisions based on the facts."