Shiva's Quotes & Sayings

In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy. — Vandana Shiva

Lord Shiva is seated deep in everyone's heart. He is Nirguna (One who is without form or its attributes). He is Nirakaar (Has no shape or form), and He is the Para-Brahman (Supreme transcendental Consciousness) that is all pervading. Believe in this. This is Rudra Puja — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

If India is an emerging economy with millions of new consumers, sell them the Volvo. Sell them the Cielo car. Sell them whatever you can, hamburgers and KFCs. It's the middle classes who have moved into being able to own a car, a refrigerator. For them there is this mantra that the General Electric refrigerator is better than some other model, that the Cielo car is fancier than the Ambassador. — Vandana Shiva

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people. — Vandana Shiva

Today the environmental movement has become opposed to issues of justice. You can see this in the way issues are framed. It's a permanent replay of jobs-versus-the-environment, in nature-versus-bread. These are extremely artificial dichotomies. — Vandana Shiva

Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up. — Vandana Shiva

The simple truth hit Shiva: if the entire society was conscious of its duties, nobody would need to fight for their individual rights. Since everybody's rights would be automatically taken care of through someone else's duties. Lord Ram was a genius! — Amish Tripathi

Nepal is a beautiful country with a lot of holy places. I also like the country because it's close to the Himalayas. According to Hindu mythology, that's the abode of Lord Shiva. — Kailash Kher

To create the protection for the corporations, government is actually growing bigger than ever before, in every part of the world. Yet it's growing extremely thin as a protector of people. — Vandana Shiva

In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back. — Vandana Shiva

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life. — Vandana Shiva

I do have fun. Even when I'm fighting I'm enjoying it: I think there's nothing as exhilarating as protecting that which you find precious. — Vandana Shiva

You know what's given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It's been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work, my classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife ... I want my days to be that way. — Abraham Verghese

The patron god of children born on Thursdays is Shiva the Destroyer, and that the day has two guiding animal spirits
the lion and the tiger. The official tree of children born on Thursday is the banyan. The official bird is the peacock. A person born on Thursday is always talking first, interrupting everyone else, can be a little aggressive, tends to be handsome ("a playboy or playgirl," in Ketut's words) but has a decent overall character, with an excellent memory and a desire to help other people. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in. — Richard Dawkins

No disrespect to any other god, but Shiva's an outsider god. He breaks the rules. He's a brilliant musician, a brilliant dancer; he treats his wife as an equal, and she opposes him many times, but he obsessively loves her. — Amish Tripathi

of the birthright of Lord Rudra's successors.' Shiva was getting increasingly uncomfortable. 'Now that Lord Rudra's successor is here, it is time for him to ascend the throne of Kashi,' continued Athithigva. 'It will be my honour to serve you, My Lord.' Shiva almost choked on a combination of — Amish Tripathi

I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on. — Vandana Shiva

Shiva's reluctance to marry is a consistent theme in Shaiva lore. In effect he opposes the birth of the cosmos, preferring the blissful state in which matter is in a state of entropy and the spirit is free of form. Not surprisingly, he is called the god of destruction. — Devdutt Pattanaik

My father's family hails from Banaras. My grandfather taught mathematics at Banaras Hindu University. Banaras is also dedicated to Lord Shiva, home to one of the great jyotirlings, the Kashi Vishwanath temple. — Amish Tripathi

Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut. — Molly Antopol

I'm not a rock star, I'm not Seane Corne or Shiva Rea or Rodney Yee or Baron (Baptiste) or John Friend, and thank God, because there's just too much risk of getting hit by flying tomatoes if you stick out that much. — Beryl Bender Birch

Shiva danced the world into existence ... that's a very nice thought. — Michael Tippett

The most loving women are the women who will test you the most. She wants you to be your fullest, most magnificent self. She won't settle for anything less. She knows it is true of you. She knows in your deepest heart you are free, you are Shiva. Anything less than that she will torment. And, as you know, she's quite good at it. — David Deida

Nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with. — Vandana Shiva

We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. It's also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, it's an economic issue, not just an ecological one. — Vandana Shiva

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm. — Allen Ginsberg

The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia. — Vandana Shiva

'Ravi' means 'sun.' It's a Sanskrit original word. And 'Shankar' is another name of Shiva, one of the holy trinity god that we worship. — Ravi Shankar

I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you. — Steven Strogatz

The director of the institute where I was working apologized about these young, enthusiastic researchers when the World Bank visited because he was afraid the institute would lose the World Bank consultancies.I went back home and started the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology-an extremely elaborate name for the tiny institute that I started in my mother's cow shed. My parents handed over family resources and said, "Put them to public purpose." That's how I survived. — Vandana Shiva

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth's resources and living processes. — Vandana Shiva

It's worse than slave trade because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. These 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing. — Vandana Shiva

It's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them. — Vandana Shiva

I believe that we will see a lot of destruction, but I believe that if we can see the right patterns and draw the right lessons from that destruction, we might be able to rebuild before it's too late. And then I have that ultimate optimism that even if we can't, life will rebuild itself. In a way, the global economy might collapse, but Gaia won't, and people's ingenuity won't. We will rebuild society, we will rebuild local economies, we will rebuild human aspirations. — Vandana Shiva

We have reached a stage where governments and political processes have been hijacked by the corporate world. Corporations can within five hours influence the vote in the U.S. Congress. They can influence the entire voting patterns of the Indian Parliament. Ordinary people who put governments in power might want to go in a different direction. I call this the phenomenon of the inverted state, where the state is no longer accountable to the people. The state only serves the interests of corporations. — Vandana Shiva

Meditation is simply awareness without any effort, an effortless alertness; it does not need any technique. But your mind is so full of thoughts, so full of dreams, so much of the past, so much of the future - it is not here and now, and awareness has to be here and now. The techniques are needed to help you to cut your roots from the past, to cut your dreams from the future, and to keep you in this moment as if only this moment exists. Then there is no need of any technique.

After Shiva's Vigyan Bhairava Tantra, in these five or ten thousand years, nobody has developed a single method.

The cathartic methods are simply to throw all your impatience, your speediness, your hurry, your repressions. — Osho

There are scarcities in drinking water when you pollute the groundwater with nitrates. There is a scarcity in diversity when you create huge cornfields with the same strain of corn so that when one disease strikes - which happened in the United States in the 70s - all the cornfields in the country are wiped out. That was the first time the U.S. realized the value of diversity in agriculture and began to discuss genetic resources and their conservation. — Vandana Shiva

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two; all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry. — Jonathan Evison

I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the [Chipko] movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting. — Vandana Shiva

Her own awareness had risen like the dawn on her back.Like a leaden sunrise veiled in a swirl of storm clouds. It was no longer enough to have answers for Shiva's sake. Indeed, it had ceased to be about mere vengeance the moment Khalid's lips touched hers in the alley by the souk. She had wanted there to be a reason for this madness, needed there to be a reason, so that she could be with him. So that she could be by his side, make him smile as she laughed, weave tales by lamplight, and share secrets in the dark.So that she could fall asleep in his arms and awaken to a brilliant tomorrow.
But it was too late. He was the Mehrdad of her nightmares. She had opened the door. She had seen the bodies hanging from the walls, without explanation. Without justification.
And without one, Shahrzad knew what must be done. Khalid had to answer for such vile deeds. Such rampant death.
Even if he was her air.
Even if she loved him beyond words. — Renee Ahdieh

Vishnu is the god who sustains and maintains what Brahma creates and what Shiva seeks to destroy. He is also pure consciousness. His name means "pervader." Vishnu pervades and enlivens all things. For devotees of Vishnu, Vishnu's blue color indicates that he is as pervasive and intangible as the sky, while his consort Laxmi's red sari represents earth's all-containing fertility. He is the protector; she is the provider: — Devdutt Pattanaik

It's not an investment if its destroying the planet. — Vandana Shiva

I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession; it's my very essence as a human being. — Vandana Shiva

The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create. — Vandana Shiva

The poorest of families, the poorest of children, are subsidizing the growth of the largest agribusinesses in the world. I think it's time we recognized that in free trade the poor farmer, the small farmer, is ending up having to pay royalties to the Monsantos of the world. — Vandana Shiva

According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We're losing them as fast as we're losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God's gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history. — Barbara Kingsolver

If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company. — Vandana Shiva

Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way. — Vandana Shiva

Lakshmi massages Vishnu's feet. Is this male domination? Kali stands on Shiva's chest. Is this female domination? Shiva is half a woman. Is this gender equality? Why then is Shakti never half a man? — Devdutt Pattanaik

Shiva ... is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan; The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things. Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, Empty darkness under the death-tent wings. She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch a new brood, Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed. — Robinson Jeffers

Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists ... Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. — Fritjof Capra

Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights. — Vandana Shiva

We have to build movements in the face of trade retaliation on the basis of people's democratic rights, on the basis of an ancient heritage of collective innovation. We work from the grassroots all the way to the national government and the World Trade Organization. It basically means being very multidimensional in our campaigns. And that is where part of the fun is. It involves both resistance and creativity. It involves constructive action, while at the same time saying "no." — Vandana Shiva

Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?" ...
"Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223" ...
"And pray, why would this number interest us?"
"It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'. — Abraham Verghese

I am Shakti, as well as Shiva. I am everything male and female, light and dark, flesh and spirit. Perfectly balanced in one single moment lasting an eternity... — Robin Rumi

I am Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. — Tucker Max

I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential. — Vandana Shiva

It's not that Monsanto is making money out of the blue. It's making money by coercing and literally forcing people to pay for what was free. Take water, for instance. Water has always been free. We've never paid for drinking water. The World Bank says the reason water has been misused is because it was never commercially priced. But the reason it's been misused is because it was wasted by the big users-industry, which polluted it. — Vandana Shiva

Thus while Ganesha helps devotees move from south to north, Kartikeya himself moves from north to south for the benefi t of devotees. While as Ganesha tempers materialistic cravings with spiritual insight, Murugan tempers his martial attitude with divine grace and romantic emotions. Thus the Goddess helps Shiva connect with humanity through her two sons. — Devdutt Pattanaik

Only when Shiva is united with Shakti does he have the power to create - — Soundarya

Globalisation has in effect made the citizen disappear, and it has reduced the state into being a mere instrument of global capital. — Vandana Shiva

Yes. But the Brahmins don't just cure people. They are also teachers, lawyers, priests, basically any intellectual profession.' 'Talented people,' sniffed Shiva. — Amish Tripathi

Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being. — Vandana Shiva

If you read Wall Street's reports, they don't talk of soya bean as originating in China. They don't talk of soya bean as soya bean. They talk of Monsanto soya. Monsanto soya is protected by a patent. It has a patent number. It is therefore treated as a creation of Monsanto, a product of Monsanto's intelligence and innovation. — Vandana Shiva

The Chipko activists have always been close to my parents, since my father was among the few forestry officials who supported them within the bureaucracy. And I was involved with the Chipko movement in my student days. — Vandana Shiva

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity - saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance - is very much a continuation of Gandhian satyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity. — Vandana Shiva

I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life. — Vandana Shiva

It feels like Shiva destroyed my universes of possibility, like He's dancing on the ashes of my snatched away dreams. — Padma Venkatraman

I describe what is happening as 'food fascism' because this system can only survive through totalitarian control. With patents on seed, an illegitimate legal system is manipulated to create seed monopolies. Seed laws that require uniformity - which criminalize diversity and the use of open-pollinated seeds - are fascist in nature. Suing farmers after contaminating their crops is another aspect of this fascism. Pseudo-hygiene laws that criminalize local, artisanal food are food fascism. And attacks on scientists and the silencing of independent research are examples of knowledge fascism. — Vandana Shiva

One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasn't there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed. — Vandana Shiva

My training in science is actually one that is very critical of mechanistic science. I was trained in quantum theory which emerged at the turn of the last century. We are a whole century behind in absorbing the leaps that quantum theory made for the human mind. — Vandana Shiva

We must occupy the food system to create food democracy. — Vandana Shiva

He actually made damnation seem attractive. She had heard of men who rejected gods, who professed not to believe, but here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to Shiva, to Buddha, to the gods of his own race, whoever they might be, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered its captive audience little choice in matters concerning duration of performance. — Tom Robbins

I didn't leave physics because of boredom. I left it because other issues compelled me in a bigger way. And I always say to myself, "When I'm 60, I'd like to go back to what I interrupted." — Vandana Shiva

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.) — Salman Rushdie

The problem of numbers can only be dealt with by recognizing that people have a fundamental right to economic security. If you provide them with economic and environmental security, the population will stabilize itself. — Vandana Shiva

I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. — Vandana Shiva

The youth in India tend to be rebellious, as with everywhere else, and that makes Shiva exciting. He has the rebellious qualities that the youths like. — Amish Tripathi

When it comes to owning the seed for collecting royalties, the GMO companies say, 'it's mine.' But when it comes to contamination, cross-pollination, health problems, the response is we're not liable. — Vandana Shiva

Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world. — Vandana Shiva

American firms are beginning to reproduce nonsustainable systems, to force the elite of India to become energy consumers of the kind that the U.S. has become. That's what globalization is about: Find markets where you can. — Vandana Shiva

So think about the colour of that leaf from the perspective of the leaf itself. What colour it absorbs and what it rejects. Is its colour green? Or is it every single colour in the world, except green?' Shiva — Amish Tripathi

I see You, Every time I look into Buddha's eyes. I give myself to You. Every time I alter one of Your 1,000s names. Honestly & fully I love You. Through Christ and Maria, Shiva and Shakti, Krishna and Radha, With every day that passes and every breath I take. I enter gratitude for receiving Your Love. Obeying Your Laws of Truthfulness and Ahimsa, Weaving Prana With hearts and souls of Gaia. Through mysticism, shamanism, sufism, and ecstatic meditations. I yearn to touch You, to feel You, to be You. Within this amazing Journey of Awareness of Your Consciousness. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers. — Vandana Shiva

If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior. — Vandana Shiva

One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence. — Vandana Shiva

He adored telling this story of near disaster and how he had triumphed, just as he relished the report of how he went on stage every night on tour in his The Cosmic Dance of Shiva, requiring all manner of spinal flexibilities and related actions, while his sacroiliac was painfully out of place. — Walter Terry

If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva. — Amish Tripathi

Rich kid," Shiva yelled, "you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you
you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind! — Salman Rushdie

For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today. — Vandana Shiva

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis. — Vandana Shiva

As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava. — Colin Thubron

And there's a special place in shiva hell reserved for men in sandals, their cracked, hardened toenails, dark with fungus, proudly on display. — Jonathan Tropper

Ecofeminism is a good term for distinguishing a feminism that is ecological from the kind of feminisms that have become extremely technocratic. I would even call them very patriarchal. — Vandana Shiva

The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel. — Vandana Shiva

Gandhi's idea of swadeshi-that local societies should put their own resources and capacities to use to meet their needs as a basic element of freedom-is becoming increasingly relevant. We cannot afford to forget that we need self-rule, especially in this world of globalization. — Vandana Shiva

A single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice. — Vandana Shiva

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need. — Vandana Shiva

Brahma is the Generator, Vishnu the Organizer and Shiva the Destroyer. Together they are G.O.D. or Brahman. All the millions of Hindu gods are just forms of the one Supreme Being. — Sarah Macdonald