William Powers > Quotes

“Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things." We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“By being grateful, appreciating all we have instead of focusing on what is lacking, we allow more of the same to flow toward us.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“The difference between actually very serious and actually very funny is actually very thin.”
― William Powers

“As hot as the blood is the missing of her. God, how I want her little hand in mine. Only another parent can fully get this. It’s completely different from separation from a parent or lover. The clay in me wants to touch that part of myself — my blood flowing through another heart — touch the memories of her birth. The first time I held her, she was the length of my forearm.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“That which we allow to exist, to flourish freely according to its own rhythms, is superior to anything our little hands create.”
― William Powers, Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia's War on Globalization

“This is how social change ultimately happens: enlightened values do not change behavior; the contours of self-interest are altered and new values rush into the vacuum.”
― William Powers, Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia's War on Globalization

“When a crowd adopts a point of view en masse, all critical thinking stops.”
― William Powers

“I thought of something from Nietzsche: “How little suffices for happiness!”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“From 1998 to 2008 the world’s rainforests have disappeared at a rate of an acre every two minutes, approximately 1 percent a year. At this rate, in forty years we will have destroyed the last of them.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“When discussing relatively “poorer” countries, we need to make a clear, explicit distinction between people living in a state of material destitution and people living healthy subsistence lifestyles. Terms like poverty and Third World mask this distinction and give license for modern professionals — of whom I’ve long been one — to undervalue, denigrate, and interfere with sustainable ways of life.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“Leah thought for a moment. The other day she’d said to me: “Not a lot of women will tell you this, but the desire to be pregnant is like the desire to eat when you’re starving. And it’s distinct from sexual desire; a physical craving to carry that weight.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream