Donella Meadows Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Donella Meadows's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Environmental Writer Donella Meadows's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 42 quotes on this page collected since March 13, 1941! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Donella Meadows: Earth Jury Vision more...
  • The sustainability revolution will be organic. It will arise from the visions, insights, experiments and actions of billions of people. The burden of making it happen is not on the shoulders of any one person or group. No one will get the credit, but everyone can contribute.

    Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows (2004). “Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update”, p.269, Chelsea Green Publishing
  • Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

  • A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.

    Donella Meadows (2008). “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, p.2, Chelsea Green Publishing
  • Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park

  • The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological - social - psychological - economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.

    "Whole Earth Models and Systems". "The CoEvolution Quarterly", p. 98 - 108, Summer 1982.
  • A good leader sets the right goals, gets things moving, and helps us to discover that we already know what to do.

  • Speak the truth. Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently, and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power. Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence. All growth is not good. The environment is a necessity, not a luxury. There is such a thing as enough.

  • How do we appreciate the good without letting it be the enemy of the perfect? How do we keep a step in the right direction from becoming a stopping point? How do we get beyond shades of insipid light green?

  • There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president.

  • Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent.

  • George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman

  • You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.

  • We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

  • Everyone except the far right wing of the Republican Party realizes that oil, gas and coal burning are the main activities that have sent the climate into bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos

  • Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information

  • There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.

  • Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.

    "Elements of the system dynamics method". Book by Jorgen Randers, p. 27, 1980.
  • The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right

  • We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

    Donella Meadows (2008). “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, p.170, Chelsea Green Publishing
  • What Clinton did with Lewinsky was despicable but was no threat to the nation. That he lied about it repeatedly and to the public is a reason for us to cease to trust him and for him to resign.

    Trust   Reason   Lied  
  • The first commandment of economics is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more - ever more. The first commandment of the Earth is: enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the Earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops.

  • It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

    Donella Meadows (2008). “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, p.165, Chelsea Green Publishing
  • A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world's nations toward saving the climate.

  • Why is our (US) government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable?

  • In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked

  • The climate continues to deteriorate.

  • There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

    Donella Meadows (2008). “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, p.97, Chelsea Green Publishing
  • No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

    Donella Meadows (2008). “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, p.177, Chelsea Green Publishing
  • You may be able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.

  • A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 42 quotes from the Environmental Writer Donella Meadows, starting from March 13, 1941! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Donella Meadows quotes about: Earth Jury Vision