“If you think about your and my grandchildren, this is what really worries me. I don’t want them – if I’m still alive by then – to say, ‘Why didn’t you do something about it?’, when you could have done.”

The price of apparently cheap food is costing nothing less than the Earth!

There is no doubt that we live in an age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.

To avert disaster, we have not only to teach men to make things but to teach them to have complete moral control over what they make.

Forests are the world’s air-conditioning system-the lungs of the planet-and we are on the verge of switching it off.

All I’m saying is that there is a price to be paid at the sharp end environmentally and everywhere else for the food that is produced in a particular way.

My Rainforests Project has three main elements. Firstly, to determine how much funding the rainforest countries need to re-orientate their economies so that the trees are worth more alive than dead.

Your greatest achievement is to love me.

The whole imposing edifice of modern medicine is like the celebrated tower of Pisa – slightly off balance.

I think we need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the generosity of imagination, the respect for wisdom that so marked Islam in its great ages.

If your children want to alter society, listen to their reasons and the idealism behind them. Don’t crush them with some clever remark straight away.

It seems to me self-evident that we cannot have capitalism without capital and, very importantly, that the ultimate source of all economic capital is Nature’s capital

To get the best results you must talk to your vegetables.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self. It is no humility for a man to think less of himself than he ought, though it might rather puzzle him to do that.

Painting transports me into another dimension which, quite literally, refreshes parts of the soul which other activities can’t reach.

Fast food may appear to be cheap food and, in the literal sense it often is, but that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations.

I believe passionately that everyone has a particular God-given ability.

So far as we know, Earth is the only planet which supports life, and it is the only planet on which we can survive.

When we imagine the world a century from now, when we look our great grandchildren in the eye and see them smiling back at us because they know we cared for them, we smile too!

My grandparents invented joylessness. They were not fun. I’ve already had more fun with my grandchildren than my grandparents ever had with me.

I go to my grandchildren. They keep their grandpa informed on what’s going on.

[When I’ll be old I see myself] as a world champion, on a big farm with an Italian-style, big family with a whole bunch of grandchildren. And the foundations for that I have already laid!

Grandparents have the freedom to see their grandchildren uncritically.

We hold the future in our hands, together, we must ensure that our grandchildren will not have to ask why we failed to do the right thing, and let them suffer the consequences.

I love music of all kinds, but there’s no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laughing; my kids, too.