black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Bill Mollison

A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).
BILL MOLLISON

Failing Law People Really
Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don’t just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.
BILL MOLLISON

Eerie House People
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

Garden Hence Shetter Words
It still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.
BILL MOLLISON

Addition Color Down Smell Toilet Unnecessary
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Country Help Huts Rights Work
Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.
BILL MOLLISON

Home Physics Teaching
It’s a revolution. But it’s the sort of revolution that no one will notice. It might get a little shadier. Buildings might function better.
BILL MOLLISON

Law People Political
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Government Reality Simple
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.
BILL MOLLISON

Blue Color Detergent Label Smell Toilet
My students are constantly amazing me.
BILL MOLLISON

Amazing Constant Students
“Should we tamper with nature?” is no longer a question – we’ve tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.
BILL MOLLISON

Earth Faces Question
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
If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.
BILL MOLLISON

Ocean Right Space
It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
BILL MOLLISON

Energy Food Friend Material Sustainable
Why is it that we don’t build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?
BILL MOLLISON

Fuel Things Trivial Water
Pollution is an unused resource.
BILL MOLLISON

Pollution Resources Unused

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Mollison Quotes