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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Donella Meadows Quotes

Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent.

– Donella Meadows

Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying – until times get tough, when they quickly give them up.

– Donella Meadows

At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they’re there. It’s a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation.

– Donella Meadows

The climate continues to deteriorate.

– Donella Meadows

Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park.

– Donella Meadows

The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future – not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.

– Donella Meadows

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached – and surpassed – their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

– Donella Meadows

Some call-in moderators are neutral and courteous. Then there’s Rush Limbaugh, who is funny and pompous and a scapegoater and hatemonger. His popularity could cause you to draw some terrible conclusions about the state of mind of the American people. It helps to remember that Bill Cosby is popular, too.

– Donella Meadows

Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.

– Donella Meadows

It’s a fair guess that at the rate we’re destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we’re pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn’t count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.

– Donella Meadows

I spent my time trying to understand grand jury procedure – a topic about which I never before had the slightest interest.

– Donella Meadows

The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made.

– Donella Meadows

We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon’s corrupt use of our tax dollars.

– Donella Meadows

The European nations take climate change very seriously.

– Donella Meadows

George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman.

– Donella Meadows

Everyone except the far right wing of the Republican Party realizes that oil, gas and coal burning are the main activities that have sent the climate into bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos.

– Donella Meadows

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.

– Donella Meadows

What I hear every day on talk radio is America’s lack of education – and I don’t mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.

– Donella Meadows

If we emit massive quantities of untested chemicals into the environment, some of them are bound to end up in places that surprise us, doing things that endanger us.

– Donella Meadows

What Clinton did with Lewinsky was despicable but was no threat to the nation. That he lied about it repeatedly and to the public is a reason for us to cease to trust him and for him to resign.

– Donella Meadows

Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning.

– Donella Meadows

Before they got vengeful, conservatives had some useful points to make about welfare. Government ‘help’ is too often guilt-assuaging gesture. It creates layers of wasteful bureaucracy. Too much help of the wrong sort creates a culture of dependency that swamps our ability to provide.

– Donella Meadows

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