“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.”

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

My students are constantly amazing me.

Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.

It still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.

I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they’re all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.

The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.”

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

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

Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.

People do things which I find quite amazing – things I would never have done and can’t understand very well.

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.

You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That’s the last place you’ll find those lessons readable.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

They want to; we need to give them this last chance to create forests, soils, clean waters, clean energies, secure communities, stable regions, and to know how to do it from hands-on experience.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone.

We don’t have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.

The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.

I only direct in self-defense.

Traditionally, Conservatives have argued that low taxes are a route to self-determination.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

In searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted.

Thou art not for the earth, nor for the Heaven the world is for thee, thou art not for the world.

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

Sexual self-restraint is only a preliminary stage in the ego’s evolution.