“If you let the world roll on the way it’s rolling, you’re voting for death. I’m not voting for death.”

To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality

Humans were my study animal now – I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals.

I have followed these streams of life over 300 km, and seen them strand on granite beaches, throwing their boulders up on a 9,000 year old pile of basalt, all the hundreds of tons of which were carried there by kelp.

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.

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.

I guess some people in classical music can keep going until they kick (die) and the (Rolling) Stones are definitely pushing the envelope but I wonder if here’s a time when you have to face whether you are as good as you used to be.

I always say that I am very proud of the work that I did with the Rolling Stones and that I am also proud of what I have done with the Rhythm Kings.

You have to hope that [good things] happen to you. […] That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in.

But we weren’t a phenomenon like the Beatles or Elvis Presley or the Rolling Stones: We were only as good as our last hit. We lived on our music and couldn’t slide on anything – and this show is that story.

When you’ve been at it for as long as we have, you go through fallow periods and blooming ones, and you know when you’re on a roll and you learn how to keep it rolling for as long as you can.

It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay.

At the end of the playback of the take of “Like A Rolling Stone”, or actually during the thing.

The very funny thing about “Like A Rolling Stone” is it was a six minute song, there was no music to read from. And there I was playing this unfamiliar instrument.