Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt. – Susan George
I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let’s get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don’t want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water. – Susan George
The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction. – Susan George
I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later. – Susan George
Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy. – Susan George
There are a lot of people who don’t contribute anything to consumption and production. – Susan George
Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn’t collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded. – Susan George
If you cut down a forest, it doesn’t matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees. – Susan George
There’s people coming in who’ve never done any politics at all, who’ve never been in a trade union, they’ve never been in a political party, they’ve never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency. – Susan George
I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol. – Susan George
The question is not only what is grown but what it’s used for. There’s not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat. – Susan George
Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We’ve seen only the tiniest beginnings of that. – Susan George
How do we get democracy at the international level? That’s our problem. and it’s essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally. – Susan George
As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status. – Susan George
What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we’re rooted somewhere, they’ve got our address, right? – Susan George
We have the most crude accounting tools. It’s tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn’t tell us the things that we need to know. – Susan George
What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like. – Susan George
There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things. – Susan George
Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it’s much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration. – Susan George
Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing. – Susan George
The World Development Movement, to take just one example, is doing good work. Some political parties are, too. – Susan George
What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can’t even measure yet. – Susan George
