All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.

The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos, the word for home.

caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.

The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings

Ruined land was accepted as the collateral damage of progress.

I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.

In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us.

That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.

Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.

My first dissatisfaction has always been with religion.

I got the idea [for Anthem's theme] in my school days, in Soviet Russia, when I heard all the vicious attacks on individualism, and asked myself what the world would be like if men lost the word 'I.'

Killing a guy and stealing his wife and child isn't too nice a thing to do.

Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that.

The discouragement masquerades as the impossibility.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

One of the best ways to cultivate a possibility mind set is to prompt yourself to dream one size bigger than you normally do. Let's face it, most people dream too small, they don't think big enough.

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.

Part of the task of the leader is to make others participate in his leadership. The best leader knows how to make his followers actually feel power themselves, not merely acknowledge his power.

I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.