Maitreyi De > Maitreyi's Quotes

“O God, I don’t need a kingdom nor do I desire to be an emperor. I don’t want rebirth or the golden vessels or heaven. I don’t need anything from you. O Lord, if you want to give me something, then give me a soft heart and hard hands, so that I can wipe the tears of others.”
― Sudha Murty, Here, There and Everywhere: Best-Loved Stories of Sudha Murthy

“writing without creativity would be akin”
― Sudha Murty, Here, There and Everywhere: Best-Loved Stories of Sudha Murthy

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.”
― Vandana Shiva

“In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.”
― Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace

“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Globalized industrialized food is not cheap: it is too costly for the Earth, for the farmers, for our health. The Earth can no longer carry the burden of groundwater mining, pesticide pollution, disappearance of species and destabilization of the climate. Farmers can no longer carry the burden of debt, which is inevitable in industrial farming with its high costs of production. It is incapable of producing safe, culturally appropriate, tasty, quality food. And it is incapable of producing enough food for all because it is wasteful of land, water and energy. Industrial agriculture uses ten times more energy than it produces. It is thus ten times less efficient.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.”
― Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace

“[How do I do it?] Well, it's always a mystery, because you don't know why you get depleted or recharged. But this much I know. I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential. And I've learned from the Bhagavad-Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me to take on the next challenge, because I don't cripple myself, I don't tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.”
― Vandana Shiva

“As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.”
― Vandana Shiva

“If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.”
― Vandana Shiva

“The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.”
― Vandana Shiva

“The myth of "free choice" begins with "free market" and "free trade". When five transnational corporations control the seed market, it is not a free market, it is a cartel.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up.”
― Vandana Shiva

“You are not Atlas carrying the world on y6our shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you”
― Vandana Shiva

“Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.”
― Vandana Shiva

“The only way to build hope is through the Earth.”
― Vandana Shiva

“We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“The fight for truth...is not just our right as free citizens of free societies. It is our duty as citizens of the earth.”
― Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, And Peace

“Climate change is not just a problem for the future. It is impacting us every day, everywhere.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.”
― Vandana Shiva

“Centralized economic systems also erode the democratic base of politics. In a democracy, the economic agenda is the political agenda.”
― Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution And Profit

“Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.”
― Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom

“Staying home is an ecological imperative, an ethical imperative. It is also a joyful option. It is the practice of oikonomia as the art of living. It is earth democracy in action, cultivating and expanding the freedoms of all beings.”
― Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom

“Seeding the future when possible extinction stares us in the face; seeding freedom when the freedoms of all beings are being closed for the limitless freedom of the 1% to exploit the earth and people, to manipulate life and our minds: this calls for a quantum leap in our imaginations, our intelligences, our capacity for compassion and love, as well as our courage for creative nonviolent resistance and non-cooperation with a system that is driving us to extinction.”
― Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom

“Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.”
― Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom

“The business of grabbing and money-making, through a violent extractive economy that the 1% have built, is burdening the earth and humanity with unbearable and non-sustainable costs, and has brought us to the brink of extinction. We do not have to escape from the earth; we have to escape from the illusions that enslave our minds and make extinction look inevitable.”
― Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs The 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom

“However, such theorising is uninteresting in the context of a comparison with ethno-science and an evaluation in an ecological perspective, though for a dualist philosophy of science restricted to the analysis of ideas alone it is just these fields which are most interesting since they are the most advanced in the reductionist-positivist scheme of thought.”
― Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development