Vandana Shiva Quotes

We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.

The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.

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.

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

Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.

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

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

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.

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

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

We've moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we're moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we're creating incomplete human beings.

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.

I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

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

The fact that I still find so much beauty in a handicraft is because my mother taught us to see not just the craft as a product but the craft as an embodiment of human creativity and human labor.

Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.

The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.

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

As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.

Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.

That amazing power of being able to stand with total courage in the face of total power and not be afraid. That is stri shakti.

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics.

Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.

Patriarchy is based on appropriating rights and leaving responsibility to others.

We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.

It is time to learn from the mistakes of monocultures of the mind and the essentialising violence of reductionist thought. It is time to turn to diversity for healing.

Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.

It is not an investment if it destroys the planet

The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.

Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.

Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army.

My mother taught that if anyone needs you, you should be available to them.

I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.

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.

When you don't take into account the way ecological systems work, then you do damage.

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."

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

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

Biotech and geo engineering have the same mindset, of engineering, of power, of control, of mastery of nature.

We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.

I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell

It is only with local [agriculture] that we can manage the complexity and care that sustainability requires.

The agrarian crisis [in India] is an unnecessary tragedy, resulting directly from an economics of greed and a politics driven by the economies of greed.

It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology.

The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.

We have managed to make the celebration of diversity our mode of resistance.

When you control seed, you control food.