For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.

We must learn how to think like the planet.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.

If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?

I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

A noble heart is a thankful heart that loves to acknowledge whenever it has received any mercy.

Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are.

That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.

NATO is built on security, but it's also built on values.

In fact, things are moving along rather well in Iraq. Nothing is perfect, of course, and freedom is messy work. The cooperation of the three major interests in Iraq has been remarkable.

Assuming the worst was always safer. And usually truer.

The Japanese say, if the flower is to be beautiful, it must be cultivated.

Give life meaning through your commitments.

The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of all human beings.

When your life changes and you become a more public person, in some ways you need to be a more closed person, you know?