“Anarchy would suggest you’re not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.”

You can’t get the mud huts right if you haven’t got things right where you are. You’ve got to get things right, working for you, and then go and say what that is.

When you go into MMA you really can’t do it half-assed. If you do it half-assed, then you’re going to get annihilated.

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

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.

Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals.

You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.

If you get someone who looks after himself and those around him, that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand.

Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.

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

Pollution is an unused resource.

We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities

I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.

The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them.

It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day.

If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they’ll die in the next fire, or where you can’t get water to them. Or they’ll sit in all the dam sites. Or they’ll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.

We don’t have any power of creation – we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

The Anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats. They believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least,’ and that which governs least is no government at all.

The main question … is not what motive inspired the law, but what it will be possible for men of bad motive to do with the law.

The State is said by some to be a necessary evil; it must be made unnecessary.

Let those that merely talk and never think, That live in the wild anarchy of drink

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.