I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

I teach self-reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So, yes, it’s seditious. But it’s peaceful sedition.

The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children.

We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

Women are the holders of all knowledge, everything a man knows he stole from a woman.

The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.

You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.

Yul Brynner's performance in "The King and I," . . . can no longer be regarded as a feat of acting or even endurance. After 30-odd . . . Mr Brynner is, quite simply, The King.

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. . . . [A] government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect . . . their governors are educated.

Officiating is the only job in America that everybody knows how to do better than the guy who is doing it.

Unfortunately, the war has cost America greatly - politically - throughout the world.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

Your problems are good. They are power in disguise.

In an earthquake, I shouldn't run out of the house - I should run into it.