George Monbiot Quotes & Sayings

Nobody ever rioted for austerity. — George Monbiot

Is the divine presence a Republican? Or is He/She/It running an inter-galactic fossil fuel conglomerate? ... whatever the explanation may be, the Paraclete appears to be as determined as any terrestrial corporate frontman to prevent a successful conclusion to the climate talks. How I know? Because every time anyone gets together to try to prevent global climate breakdown, He swaths the rich, densely habited parts of the world with snow and ice, while leaving obscurer places to cook. — George Monbiot

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) — George Monbiot

Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality — George Monbiot

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

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

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

To seek enlightenment, intellectual or spiritual; to do good; to love and be loved; to create and to teach: these are the highest purposes of humankind. If there is meaning in life, it lies here. — George Monbiot

Beware of anyone who describes a human being as something other than human being. — George Monbiot

Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favour? Well maybe She should have thought of that when She was besetting us with droughts and floods and poisonous snakes. Nature started the fight for survival and now She wants to quit because She's losing? Well I say 'Hard Chesse! — George Monbiot

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

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. — George Monbiot

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. — George Monbiot

Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country's most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in which shoppers queue all night, then stampede into the shops, elbow, trample and sometimes fight to be the first to carry off some designer junk which will go into landfill before the sales next year. The madder the orgy, the greater the triumph of economic management. — George Monbiot

Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell. — George Monbiot

The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government. — George Monbiot

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

The problem is compounded by the fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent. — George Monbiot

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

In managing our transport systems, our governments must constantly negotiate the paradox of mass movement. They must create a system which, for the sake of speed and efficiency, treats us like a herd, constantly prodded and coralled, divided, re-formed and forced into line. At the same time it must grant us the illusion of autonomy. — George Monbiot

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

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

The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians. — George Monbiot

An attraction to large predators often seems to be associated with misanthropy, racism and the far right. — George Monbiot

The trouble is that people hate coaches, and for good reason. Coach travel is a dismal and humiliating experience. When I take the bus, as I sometimes must, from Oxford to Cambridge, I arrive feeling almost suicidal. — George Monbiot

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

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. — George Monbiot

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 — George Monbiot

I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath. — George Monbiot

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

The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen. — George Monbiot

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

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

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. — George Monbiot

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings. — George Monbiot

We are often told we are materialistic. It seems to me, we are not materialistic enough. We have a disrespect for materials. We use it quickly and carelessly.
If were genuinely materialistic people, we would understand where materials come from and where they go to.
But, at the moment, the entire global economy seems to be built on the model of digging things up from one hole in the ground on one side of the earth, transporting them around the world, using them for a few days, and sticking them in a hole in the ground on the other side of the world. — George Monbiot

People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. — George Monbiot

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

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

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. — George Monbiot

Confronted with the twin disasters of climate change and an impending oil peak, it is hard to see how anyone could justify the assertion that the need to drive a car which can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds (the Audi S4 for example) overrides the Ethiopians' need to avoid recurrent famines, or the whole world's need to avoid the economic catastrophe we'll suffer if petroleum peaks too soon. — George Monbiot

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement. — George Monbiot

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. — George Monbiot

The schedules are crammed with shows urging us to travel further, drive faster, build bigger, buy more, yet none of them are deemed to offend the rules, which really means that they don't offend the interests of business or the pampered sensibilities of the Aga class. The media, driven by fear and advertising, are hopelessly biased towards the consumer economy and against the biosphere. — George Monbiot

So, if you don't fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud. — George Monbiot

All nationhood is to some extent the artificial, the product of historical accident, the convenience of tyrants and the disengagement of colonists. — George Monbiot

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

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

Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works. — George Monbiot

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 — George Monbiot

The problem with gross domestic product is the gross bit. There are no deductions involved: all economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Social harm is added to, not subtracted from, social good. A train crash which generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs is deemed by this measure as beneficial as an uninterrupted service which generates £1bn in ticket sales. — George Monbiot

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

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

I thought of the places I would be leaving, of what they were and what they could become. I pictured trees returning to the bare slopes, fish and whales returning to the bay. I thought of what my children and grandchildren might find here, and of how those who worked the land and sea might prosper if this wild vision were to be realized. — George Monbiot

Arrange these threats in ascending order of deadliness: wolves, vending machines, cows, domestic dogs and toothpicks. I will save you the trouble: they have been ordered already.
The number of deaths known to have been caused by wolves in North America in the twenty-first century is one: if averaged out, that would be 0.08 per year. The average number of people killed in the US by vending machines is 2.2 (people sometimes rock them to try to extract their drinks, with predictable results). Cows kill some twenty people in the US, dogs thirty-one. Over the past century, swallowing toothpicks caused the deaths of around 170 Americans a year. Though there are sixty thousand wolves in North America, the risk of being killed by one is almost nonexistent. — George Monbiot