Mark Sundeen > Quotes

“It made Daniel think. The people who had the least were the most willing to share. He outlined a dictum that he would believe the rest of his life: the more people have, the less the give. Similarly, generous cultures produce less waste because excess is shared, whereas stingy nations fill their landfills with leftovers.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“The person with the least worry over the compromises he must make is, of course, the person who doesn't compromise.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“Credit and debt keep us fixated on the past and the future.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“Ever since he'd given up money, certain people had called him a freeloader, a parasite. (As one comment-thread malapropist put it: "Do you Believe you are smooching off others?") They demanded to know what he was giving back. To which Suelo asked, Who says you need to give something back? What does a raven give? What does a barnacle give, or a coyote? In his view, every living thing gave plenty, merely by existing. But from a strictly materialistic view, his critics had an excellent point. A raven contributes nothing, except of course his own corpse, which will feed some other being. Now Suelo was dying, and he offered his body to the ravens, the coyotes, the ringtails, the mice, the ants.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“This is why governments all over the world love missionaries—they civilize people and get them into the money system,” Suelo observes now, but at the time he was flabbergasted. What of Jesus’s teaching his followers to give up possessions? “And suddenly it dawned on me: if you were going to call something Antichrist, this would be it. The people who were promoting this so-called Christianity are really Antichrist.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“This is a nation that professes to be a Christian nation," [Suelo] tells me, surveying his temporary kingdom. "And yet it's basically illegal to live according to the teachings of Jesus.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“I look at the trees and the birds and I know it’s not true. I’m not yet sure how to do it, but I’m going to learn.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Virtue was efficiency and thrift and, most of all, work. Vice was laziness and indulgence and, worst of all, waste.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“hugelkultur, a method of burying logs in earthen mounds as the basis for gardens, a nifty function-stacking that stores nutrients and moisture in the soil while sequestering the carbon of waste wood that might otherwise be burned.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“In a sense we are born in hock: with the national debt hovering around $ 18 trillion, each new baby delivered in America takes her first breath owing approximately $ 57,000.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“We are just imperfect people trying to help heal a broken world,”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“We can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.” He viewed economics through a Buddhist lens, asserting that “the essence of civilization [is] not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“artisanal that, including butter coaxed from cows presumably allowed to bed with their masters and stream Netflix,”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“C. S. Lewis wrote of temptation, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“It felt so joyful,” Ethan told me, “realizing that instead of having this money in the bank—and I could be dead tomorrow—I got to actually use energy to create the world I wanted to see.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy.
The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“Here’s where my pastoral fantasy ran aground: the pound of organic butter cost six dollars and fifty cents. The ceiling for buying my way into grace was about five bucks.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“This system, in which paper money is worth only a fraction of its stated value in gold or silver, was employed in the United States into the twentieth century. Then”
― Mark Sundeen, The Man Who Quit Money

“hadn’t the agrarian Wendell Berry written, “How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“For eons, humans had transformed sunlight into food, through the growing of edible plants and animal feed. In recent decades all that changed. Modern industrial farming relied not on the sun but on fossil fuels, refined into pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and the oil and gas needed to transport food hundreds of miles to market. Our farming system represented a net loss of energy. Whereas sunshine was infinite, oil would one day run out. In the meantime, the damage of industrial farming to the world’s soil might be irreversible.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Ethan left Seattle overjoyed by the celebration and unity he’d felt in the streets, but also disillusioned with the results. For all the careful organizing, the movement needed more training in nonviolence. “People were singing for peace,” he said. “But once the rubber bullets and concussion grenades started, they were hurling concrete at the police.” The protests reinforced the chasm between citizens and cops, perpetuating the model of a police state. Reporters had deepened the divide, focusing on the masked vandals instead of the elderly Quaker”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“What I have never been able to tolerate is the prospect that my few years on earth will be frittered away filling out the form to verify that I filled out the previous form, or worse, toiling in the service of some enterprise that perpetuates the things I hate: war, corporate bullying, bureaucratic hoop-jumping, plunder of nature, and more hours tethered to electronic screens. I was willing to work, but I wanted my work to matter—to repair land and cities, to cultivate peace and justice.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“In capitalist economies that require continuous increase in consumption, voluntary poverty constitutes a threat to power. What keeps the gears spinning is income that is both taxable and disposable.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“the “environment” is not a place we vacation to gaze at warblers, but our home, the one and only garden that feeds us. In”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“find a balance between building a new world and helping to save the existing one.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“at the heart of permaculture lay a gorgeously empathetic view of human nature: people aren’t inherently wasteful and greedy, but fall into those patterns because of the temptations of the modern world.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Ethan developed an ethos that over the years he whittled to a one-line mantra: I don’t want my freedom, comfort, and mobility to require killing, polluting, and exploiting.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Rail as we might against fracking and wars that protect our oil supply, we support those things with our gas furnaces, cars, and taxes. Grieve”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America