One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.
We can master change not though force or fear, but only though the free work of an understanding mind, though an openness to new knowledge and fresh outlooks, which can only strengthen the most fragile and most powerful of human gifts: the gift of reason.
We know that if one man’s rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.
You knew that what is given or granted can be taken away, that what is begged can be refused; but that what is earned is kept.
Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
If communist unions ever gain a position to exercise influence in the transport lanes of the world, the free world will have suffered a staggering blow.
The first sign of tyranny is government’s complicity in privatizing the commons for private gain.
Like other Americans, I’ve reconciled myself to the idea that an animal’s life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production – which subjects animals to a life of torture – has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.
Wind has the potential to produce many, many more jobs per kilowatt hour than coal. But the coal industry has tremendous political clout on Capitol Hill because of its alliance with the railroads and coal-burning utilities.
If we don’t cut carbon’s money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations.
The most patriotic thing you can do is to take care of the environment and try to live sustainably.
Most Americans don’t know about environmental problems, because we have in our country a negligent and indolent press. The biggest lie that the right wing holds in our country is that there is such a thing as a liberal media. Americans are getting their news from the right-wing media.
Resurrecting American democracy is vital to averting climate catastrophe. We must first repeal the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which has flooded elections with billions of oily petrodollars from carbon tycoons.
Corporate polluters, their phony think tanks and political toadies like to marginalize environmentalists as tree huggers, or radicals. But there is nothing radical about clean air or water.
Sometimes it’s more important to change politicians than light bulbs.
There are really only two stories the coal industry tells: “Coal keeps the lights on, and by implication, you’ll live in medieval, soul-shattering darkness if you don’t let us do whatever the hell we want with the landscape and drinking water you public health, because there’s no alternative.”
The Republicans are 90% corrupt, and the Democrats are 50% corrupt.
The best measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it allocates the goods of the land, the public trust assets.