“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.”

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

If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don’t listen to them that much.

Most biologists, (says Vogel, 1981) seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region.

I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

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.

I never listened to what they were saying – I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.

I confess to a rare problem – gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me – but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves.

The worst thing about permaculture is that it’s extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

Permaculture offers a radical approach to food production and urban renewal, water, energy and pollution. It integrates ecology, landscape, organic gardening, architecture and agro-forestry in creating a rich and sustainable way of living.

I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don’t understand anything about where we live, and we don’t want to.

There are only four things in all cleaners – whether it’s shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn’t matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label.

Permaculture challenges what we’re doing and thinking – and to that extent it’s sedition.

Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.

Use all the skills you have in relation to others – and that way we can do anything.

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.

It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.

Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

The youth should come together to challenge the status quo. They must not give up.

But we are strong, each in our purpose, and we are all more strong together.

Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together.

Right now, holding you, i feel like we have a shot at beating all odds and making it together.