“The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, “Permaculture Two is a seditious book.” And I said, “At last someone understands what permaculture’s about.””

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 uses appropriate technology giving high yields for low energy inputs, achieving a resource of great diversity and stability. The design principles are equally applicable to both urban and rural dwellers

You ever think about this? Every year you live, you pass the anniversary of your death. Now you don’t know what day it is, of course.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

Gen. Tommy Franks told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq – a war more than a year away.

This is the wonderful truth, my dear friends: the Word, which became flesh two thousand years ago, is present today in the Eucharist

When you’re 20 you can put a ton of old-age prosthetics on and be an old guy, but when you’re 70 you can’t play a 20-year-old.

Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.

At the time of ‘Words, Words, Words,’ I’m a 19-year-old getting up feeling like he’s entitled to do comedy and tell you what he thinks of the world, so that’s inherently a little bit ridiculous.

One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.