“If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.”

My persona on stage was always coming from a place of I know better than you and I’m going to be a little bit pretentious in your face with these sort of crass ideas.

There’s no happy ending where we prevent climate change any more. Now the question is, is it going to be a miserable century or an impossible one, and what comes after that.

Climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.

I’m not sure I’m a very good source of advice since we’re kind of making this up as we go along.

Maybe that was a strange, personal job between me and myself, to show how overreaching I was being as a woman. The only way I could express that was by comparing it to the universe.

So far the earth has warmed about a degree Fahrenheit globally averaged. That doesn’t seem like an enormous amount but it’s unlike what we would have expected twenty years ago.

I have nothing against romanticism. I’m all for it. I’m helpless in the face of romance.

If [a student’s] college’s endowment portfolio has fossil-fuel stock, then their educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degree.

There is nothing that will discombobulate and degrade [more] the lives of people near the margin on this planet. You don’t have to look much past New Orleans to see that. Who took the hit? Some of the poorest people in the U.S.

If I have an iPod, I’m good.

I think the same around the world. At 350.org we just trained 500 young people from around the world in Istanbul for a few weeks. We had 5000 applications from young people who wanted to be part of the training. There’s real hunger out there.

Colonialism of one kind or another, imperialism of one kind or another, and slavery, and on and on and on.

When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one’s figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that’s good.

I think the best way is to keep stressing, that, as we build out a new energy system, one of the best things about it, if we do it right, will be that it will be more local, more democratic, more distributed, and, in the long run, much more economically sensible.

I’ve always been opposed to population control. In climate terms, population is not the biggest problem going forward.

The purpose of meditation is to awaken in us the sky-like nature of mind, and to introduce us to that which we really are, our unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death

Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you’ve gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.

Any astronaut can tell you you’ve got to do everything you can to learn about your life support system and then do everything you can to take care of it.

Everything comes to those who wait… except a cat.

I put everything in that last lap, it was very emotional when I crossed the line. It was all I had, I gave it all.

When you’re young everything feels like the end of the world, but its not; its just the beginning.

The more attention you give to the paparazzi, the more it just, like, validates everything . . .

I try to block out everything that distracts me. Even a big play, I blank it out.

Greed is so destructive. It destroys everything.