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Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

Bill Mollison

I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.
BILL MOLLISON

People Philosophers Teach
I think Americans are so poor it’s pitiful, because you don’t understand the natural world at all.
BILL MOLLISON

Natural Thinking World
We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.
BILL MOLLISON

Encounter Process Reactive
A lending library enables people to help themselves to information; a locked-up book collection is useful only to the person who owns it.
BILL MOLLISON

Book Collection Information Own Person
It is no mere coincidence that there is both an historic and a present relationship between community (people assisting each other) and a poverty of power due to financial recession.
BILL MOLLISON

Community People Poverty
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
BILL MOLLISON

One Rainwater Thing
As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing.
BILL MOLLISON

Hardly Mature Sufficient Trees
To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one’s needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.
BILL MOLLISON

Land Needs World
If you’re dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can’t connect them.
BILL MOLLISON

Assembly Details Together
Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Physics Teaching
Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees.
BILL MOLLISON

Animal Apples Years
I’m certain I don’t know what permaculture is. That’s what I like about it – it’s not dogmatic. But you’ve got to say it’s about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.
BILL MOLLISON

Design Eerie Permaculture
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn’t write it down fast enough.
BILL MOLLISON

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

Growing Kitchen Looks
The extinction rate is so huge now, we’re to the stage where we’ve got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.
BILL MOLLISON

Enough Extinction Together
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher.
BILL MOLLISON

Garden People Philosopher

Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

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Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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