“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.”

As technology advances at an alarming pace, the place of drawing remains as valid as ever in the creation of art and architecture.

The demand for organic food is growing at a remarkable rate. Consumers have made it clear that they want organic produce and every sector of the food chain is responding, with the kind of results we have just seen.

A jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce – like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.

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.

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.