David Suzuki > Quotes

“We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit”
― David Suzuki

“Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life's breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.”
― David Suzuki

“The environment is so fundamental to our continued existence that it must transcend politics and become a central value of all members of society.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning home. Ecology is the study of home, while economics is the management of home. Ecologists attempt to define the conditions and principles that govern life’s ability to flourish through time and change. Societies and our constructs, like economics, must adapt to those fundamentals defined by ecology. The challenge today is to put the “eco” back into economics and every aspect of our lives.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“As we distance ourselves further from the natural world, we are increasingly surrounded by and dependent on our own inventions. We become enslaved by the constant demands of technology created to serve us.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“Our identity includes our natural world, how we move through it, how we interact with it and how it sustains us.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“There is no environment "out there" that is separate from us. We can't manage our impact on the environment if we are our surroundings. Indigenous people are absolutely correct: we are born of the earth and constructed from the four sacred elements of earth, air, fire and water. (Hindus list these four and add a fifth element, space.)”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“Why do you need to go outside? For one thing, to appreciate what it is that keeps you alive. And the more time you spend outside, the more you are able to sense change in that world. If you can smell something, chances are that unless it's flowers or food, it doesn't belong there and is not good for us. But even more profound, we have to get outside and seek nature because we need that connection for our physical and mental health.”
― David Suzuki, Letters to My Grandchildren

“To me, the real challenge is the human mind, which is driving our actions: our beliefs and values shape the way we see the world, which in turn determines how we will treat it. So long as we assume that we are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around us, we will not be able to see the dangers we create. To see those, we have to recognize that our very lives and our well-being depend on the richness of nature.”
― David Suzuki, Letters to My Grandchildren

“The way we’ve set up corporations, even a majority vote of stockholders cannot demand that a corporation’s policies reflect the public good or preserve the environment for future use. That’s because profit is the one and only motive. It’s up to government and it’s up to people to protect the public interest. Corporations are simply not allowed to.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

“There are some things in the world we can't change - gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.”
― David Suzuki

“The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.”
― David Suzuki

“The way we live has less to do with individual choices and more to do with the general bent of our society than many of us realize. We forget that we don’t need everything.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

“You needn’t be confused about which “expert” to believe, just talk to elders around you, people who have lived in your part of the world for the past seventy or eighty years. Ask them what they remember about the air, about other species, about the water, about neighbourhoods and communities, about caring between people and the ways they communicated and entertained each other. Our elders tell us of the immense changes that have occurred in the span of a single human life; all you have to do is to project the rate of change they have experienced into the future to get an idea of what might be left in the coming decades. Is this progress? Is this way of life sustainable?”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. When the crisis is environmental and global,”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

“Benjamin Franklin, said: “Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“At first you are awed by the splendour, by the beauty, of the planet and then you look down and you realize that this one planet is the only thing we have. Every time the sun comes up and goes down… and for us that’s sixteen times a day… you see a thin, thin, thin layer just above the surface, maybe 10 or 12 kilometres thick. That is the atmosphere of the Earth. That is it. Below that is life. Above it is nothing. JULIE PAYETTE, Canadian astronaut”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

“If we call insects "pests," then we can make war on them. And we have done that, developing powerful chemicals that kill all insects to eliminate the ones that are troublesome to us. To me, using broad-spectrum pesticides is like dealing with high rates of crime in a town or neighbourhood by removing or killing everyone in the area.”
― David Suzuki, Letters to My Grandchildren

“We repeat like a religious mantra the unquestioned benefits and power of science, information and economics, without inspecting the structures and methodology on which they are built. Many of these beliefs are insupportable and dangerous. For example, the notion that human beings are so clever that we can use science and technology to escape the restrictions of the natural world is a fantasy that cannot be fulfilled. Yet it underlies much of government’s and industry’s rhetoric and programs.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

“Change is never easy, and it often creates discord, but when people come together for the good of humanity and the Earth, we can accomplish great things.”
― David Suzuki

“The place where we spend most of our lives moulds our priorities and the way we perceive our surroundings. A human-engineered habitat of asphalt, concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of and above nature, immune from uncertainty and the unexpected of the wild.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“That little walk powerfully reminded me that nature is our touchstone. However sophisticated and technologically advanced we may be, we are biological creatures, utterly dependent on her beneficence for clean air, water and food.”
― David Suzuki

“Albert Einstein was asked one day by a friend “Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?” “Yes, it would be possible,” he replied, “but it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning—as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation in wave pressure.” RONALD W. CLARK, Einstein: The Life and Times”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“The nation that values youth and thinness is the most obese in the world. The place where the dollar rules has more diparity between rich and poor than any other industrialized nation. Although peace is one of its highest ideals, the United States is well known for violence. More people use drugs regularly in this land of opportunity than in the rest of the world put together. And more people per capita are imprisoned in the land of the free than in any other Western country.”
― David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

“Trees for which there is no commercial value are referred to as "weeds" that interfere with commercial harvesting. That's what alders were called until a method to make high-grade paper from them was developed, but you'd never know that alders play an important ecological role. They are the first trees to grow after an opening is cleared in a forest, and they fix nitrogen from the air to fertilize the soil for the later-growing, longer-lived, bigger tree species. Yew trees have tough wood with gnarled branches and were called weeds and burned until a powerful anti-cancer agent was found in their bark.”
― David Suzuki, Letters to My Grandchildren

“We needn't be saddened with the impossible weight of managing the entire biosphere, but we must meet the challenge of living in balance with the sacred elements.”
― David Suzuki, The Legacy: An Elder's Vision for Our Sustainable Future

“A balance between sustainable ecology and sustainable human life, on the one hand, and the unfettered drive for profit, on the other, is just an oxymoron.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

“The future doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is now and our memory of what happened in the past. But because we invented the idea of a future, we're the only animal that realized we can affect the future by what we do today.”
― David Suzuki