“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.”

In fact, corporations are the infants of our society – they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.

Certainly, packets of sea ice, in say the Arctic, which have failed to fully reform in the last couple of years.

In the States we’ve had by far the largest demonstrations in the last few years. The largest civil disobedience actions about anything in US history in the last 30 years have all been centred around the climate.

We’re not at the point of trying to stop global warming; it’s too late for that. We’re trying to keep it from becoming a complete and utter calamity

It’s off the charts – and if you don’t believe the scientists, ask the insurance industry, the people we pay to analyze risk in our society.

You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet

If one wanted to stigmaitise, that’s how one would do it – lots and lots of people saying “we’re severing our ties”.

Probably nothing that we have ever managed to do quite equals the basic undermining of the physical stability of the planet on which most of the world’s poor people depend.

“Science,” of course, replaced “God” as a guiding concept for many people after Darwin. Or, really, the two were rolled up into a sticky ball. To some degree this was mindless worship of a miracle future, the pursuit of which has landed us in the fix we now inhabit.

Without a movement pressing for change, there’s little hope. We’ve got to work the political system to make this happen fast. The physics and chemistry are daunting. The resources on the other side are very large.

It is unbelievably sad and ironic that the first victims of global warming are almost all going to come from places that are producing virtually none of the problem.

We’d won the argument 15 years before, we were just losing the fight. And so it became clear to some of us that we would need to organise to fight, that we weren’t going to win.

I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.

We have to get our states to adopt what are called “renewable portfolio standards” pledging to use a lot of renewable energy by 2015 or 2020. We have to work with businesses and shops to get them engaged in the same way.

[The Maldives] they’ve become deeply politically engaged – just for instance, the president taught his whole cabinet to scuba dive so they could hold an underwater cabinet meeting along their dying coral reef and pass a 350 resolution to send to the U.N.

TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.

The Arab World is writing a new future; the pen is in our own hands.

I reside in a new colony for the Chinese-singing banjo player, with a population of one. At least I have something I have to do with my life.

Every actor has his own identity. I don’t aspire to be Bond. My quest is to do something new, something different.

With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.

I have the responsibility of over four million people, and I am in a position to do good, to be able to bring about a new life for my people, and I will continue to move in that direction.

The art world is now a fashion industry, led by its Whitney Biennial ‘nose for the new look.’ But nobody, it seems, has the guts or the brains to blow the necessary whistle and holler

I don’t understand these new coaches who don’t drink. What do they do when they get beat?

The global system they hope to create is one of new walls and new isolation, and radically smaller horizons. It is an anti-democratic, anti-economic-growth, and anti-progress agenda.