“We’d like to get the fossil fuel industry on the back foot for a while, having to deal with us.”

I think I have felt most profoundly that in our disruption of the most basic physical processes of creation, we are engaged not only in the act of suicidal self-destructiveness, but also in an act of thorough-going blasphemy.

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.

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.

Never help an ungrateful person get on their feet.

Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.

The militant Muslim is the person who beheads the infidel, while the moderate Muslim holds the feet of the victim.

The mind wants to take a million steps at once. Our feet remind us that only one is possible.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Once I wept for I had no shoes. Then I met a man with no feet, so I took his shoes. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was going to need them.