“If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.”

Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

Pollution is an unused resource.

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.

It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.

If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

There is one, and only one solution, and we have almost no time to try it. We must turn all our resources to repairing the natural world, and train all our young people to help.

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.

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

We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.

One of the big problems in America’s economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can’t be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

I guess some people in classical music can keep going until they kick (die) and the (Rolling) Stones are definitely pushing the envelope but I wonder if here’s a time when you have to face whether you are as good as you used to be.

I always say that I am very proud of the work that I did with the Rolling Stones and that I am also proud of what I have done with the Rhythm Kings.

You have to hope that [good things] happen to you. […] That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in.

But we weren’t a phenomenon like the Beatles or Elvis Presley or the Rolling Stones: We were only as good as our last hit. We lived on our music and couldn’t slide on anything – and this show is that story.

When you’ve been at it for as long as we have, you go through fallow periods and blooming ones, and you know when you’re on a roll and you learn how to keep it rolling for as long as you can.

It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay.