These sustainability quotes will inspire you. Sustainability focuses on meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging sustainability quotes, sustainability sayings, and sustainability proverbs.
Best Sustainability Quotes
- “Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy, and sustainable human development.” ~ Kofi Annan
- “Sustainability is treating ourselves and our environment as if we are to live on this earth forever.” ~ Arron Wood
- “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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“Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.” ~ Terence McKenna
- “But the only possible guarantee of the future is responsible behavior in the present.” ~ Wendell Berry
- “Sustainability is living on nature’s income rather than living on its capital.” ~ Murray Gell-Mann
- “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” ~ Peter Drucker
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“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity. From discord find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Sustainability is a political choice, not a technical one. It’s not a question of whether we can be sustainable, but whether we choose to be” ~ Gary Lawrence
- “Sustainability is the key to our survival on this planet and will also determine success on all levels.” ~ Shari Arison
- “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
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“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them” ~ Paul Hawken
- “The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability.” ~ Patrick Dixon
- “Sustainability takes forever. And that’s the point.” ~ William McDonough
- “People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.” ~ Ha-Joon Chang
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“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” ~ Edmund Burke
- “Buy less, choose well, make it last. Quality rather than quantity: That is true sustainability. If people only bought beautiful things rather than rubbish, we wouldn’t have climate change!” ~ Vivienne Westwood
- “The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves.” ~ Rachel Carson
- “Sustainability: It’s the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do, it’s the profitable thing to do.” ~ Hunter Lovins
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“Sustainability is no longer optional. Companies that fail to adopt such practices will perish. They will not only lose cost basis: they will also suffer in recruiting employees as well as attracting customers.” ~ John Replogle
- “We are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Sustainability is a set of conditions and trends in a given system that can continue indefinitely” ~ Alan AtKisson
- “The future is green energy, sustainability, renewable energy.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
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“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” ~ Edward Abbey
- “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and the sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.” ~ Rajendra K. Pachauri
- “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” ~ Thomas Fuller
- “Waiting is a sustained effort to stay focused on God through prayer and belief.” ~ Max Lucado
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“The funny thing about sustainability is you gotta sustain it.” ~ Ron Finley
- “We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.” ~ Wendell Berry
- “In many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability.” ~ Rob Hopkins
- “No one person has to do it all but if each one of us follow our heart and our own inclinations we will find the small things that we can do to create a sustainable future and a healthy environment.” ~ John Denver
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“Education beats at the heart of sustainability.” ~ Andrea Illy
- “The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”” ~ Ursula Goodenough
- “Sustainability is here to stay or we may not be” ~ Niall FitzGerald
- “We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature’s ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.” ~ Fritjof Capra
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“Because we don’t think about future generations, they will never forget us.” ~ Henrik Tikkanen
- “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” ~ John Muir
- “Sustainability is another word for justice, for what is just is sustainable and what is unjust is not.” ~ Matthew Fox
- “The question is wholly other, deeper and equally relevant to all: whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human “I.”” ~ Vaclav Havel
- “Anything you do sustainably feels so good that you’re a full-on addict as soon as you try it. If you eat only vegetables and fruits that you grow yourself from your garden, or organic food, it tastes so much better and is so much better for you, you can’t really go back.” ~ Daryl Hannah
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“More and more companies are reaching out to their suppliers and contractors to work jointly on issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility, ethics, and compliance.” ~ Simon Mainwaring
- “The two-word definition of sustainability is ‘one planet.'” ~ Mathis Wackernagel
- “Developed and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class-involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing-are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns.” ~ Maurice Strong
- “As citizen-activists the world over merge, they can become an irresistible force to create peace and protect the planet. From here will come a new movement to abolish nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction. From here will come the demand for sustainable communities, for new systems of energy, transportation and commerce. From here comes the future rushing in on us. How does one acquire the capacity for active citizenship? The opportunities exist every day…Active citizenship begins with an envisioning of the desired outcome and a conscious application of spiritual principles.” ~ Dennis Kucinich
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“The most patriotic thing you can do is to take care of the environment and try to live sustainably.” ~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
- “When we talk about global crisis, or a crisis of humanity, we cannot blame a few politicians, a few fanatics, or a few troublemakers. The whole of humanity has a responsibility because it is our business, human business. I call this a sense of universal responsibility. That is a crucial point.” ~ Dalai Lama , Sustainability quotes business
- “If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it’s primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, ‘What you don’t have in your mind, you have on your shelf.’ But now we have the Web.” ~ Sylvia Earle
- “When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities – locally, nationally and globally – that share the characteristics of all successful communities.” ~ William J. Clinton
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“After all, sustainability means running the global environment – Earth Inc. – like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.” ~ Maurice Strong
- “Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people. It is up to science to spread the understanding that the choice is not between wild places or people, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man.” ~ Thomas Lovejoy
- “Society is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure – but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.” ~ Edmund Burke
- “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” ~ Alan Kay
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“Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory.” ~ Diane Arbus
- “Community leadership is the courage, creativity and capacity to inspire participation, development and sustainability for strong communities.” ~ Gustav Nossal , Sustainability quotes development
- “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” ~ Chief Seattle
- “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
- “Even chimps understand the concept – if a troop of chimps enters a fruit tree, they will only pick the fruits that are ripe and leave the others growing. That is sustainability.” ~ Jane Goodall
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“Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence.” ~ Brooks Stevens
- “Quite frankly, there is no answer to climate change without substantially, dramatically, increasing the amount of renewable energy in the global energy system.” ~ Christiana Figueres
- “Agency has become a catchword. In a way, this intoxication with ‘agency’ is the product of liberal individualism. The ability of individuals to fashion themselves, to change their live, is given ideological priority over the relation within which they themselves are actually formed, situated, and sustained.” ~ Talal Asad
- “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~ Aldo Leopold
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“When you gaze long into the Abyss of Sustainability, the Abyss of Sustainability also gazes into you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Sustainability has become an ornament.” ~ Rem Koolhaas
- “Each of us has a responsibility for the sustainability of our planet and each of us can make a difference if we choose to do so.” ~ Miranda Kerr
- “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ~ Rachel Carson
