Wangari Maathai Quotes

I think what the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war. Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace.

All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet.

We do the right thing not to please people but because it's the only logically reasonable thing to do, as long as we are being honest with ourselves - even if we are the only ones.

So GMOs, who knows? Maybe GMOs will come, they will get maize that produces double. But who knows what else may happen to the maize?

Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.

I'm sure that many people who are involved in an environmental effort ... they will be pretty much encouraged by this recognition.

The developed world should be willing to help [Africa] and support her and make this energy affordable.

You can't reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.

I think some of these solutions are prepared in an office without a full understanding of the local situation.

Nobody in the world is completely dependent on another person, but we are all interdependent.

When people can't use you, they ridicule what you represent. I was lucky that I understood that, because when one does not understand that, it is very easy to be broken and to be subdued.

Unfortunately, the issues of climate change, unlike many other issues, are very subtle because the changes we observe are very, very subtle.

Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.

And so I'm saying that, yes, colonialism was terrible, and I describe it as a legacy of wars, but we ought to be moving away from that by now.

I was particularly talking with respect to aid, because that to me is one area that can make people so dependent, and unfortunately, that dependency starts with the government.

All through the ages the African people have made efforts to deliver themselves from oppressive forces.

We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty and send children to school and provide health.

As long as there is no trust and confidence that there will be justice and fairness in resource distribution, political positioning will remain more important than service

I think that for anybody who has worked in the civil society, government bureaucracy moves very very slowly.

Culture defines who we are and how we see ourselves. A new attitude toward nature provides space for a new attitude toward culture and the role it plays in sustainable development

The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station.

Do not be naive. AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did it.

Women are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve.

People are dynamic. They change, and soon as there are enough of you, things change [for a whole society].

There will always be people who think that you have ambitions.

What people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don't see the danger.

The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.

Finally I was able to see that if I had a contribution I wanted to make, I must do it, despite what others said. That I was OK the way I was. That it was all right to be strong.