“If it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from the wreckage.”

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.

One who works for his own profit is likely to work hard. One who works for the use of others, without profit to himself, is likely not to work any harder than he must.

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

He who serves the public best, makes the highest profits.

I can be free only to the extent that others are forbidden to profit from their physical, economic, or other superiority to the detriment of my liberty.

Taxing profits is tantamount to taxing success.

We do a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.

The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.

This is what capitalism, the much abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.