Bill Mollison Quotes - Page 2

To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one's needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.

The first time I saw a review of one of my permaculture books was three years after I first started writing on it. The review started with, "Permaculture Two is a seditious book." And I said, "At last someone understands what permaculture's about."

We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.

If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.

Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use them or value them creatively.

The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.

We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.

Permaculture is an integrated, evolving system of perennial and self-perpetuating plants and animal species useful to man.

The value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water. Those property-owners with a constant source of pure water already have an economically-valuable "product" from their land, and need look no further for a source of income.

Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.

The agriculture taught at colleges between 1930 and 1980 has caused more damage on the face of the Earth than any other factor.

Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design. You don’t have to be a botanist; you don’t have to be a bulldozer driver; you don’t have to be a fence builder; you don’t have to be an architect. What the designer has to do is look at the relationships.

The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.

What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.

There is no more time-wasting process than that of believing people will act, and then finding that they will not.

If and when the whole world is secure, we have won a right to explore space, and the oceans. Until we have demonstrated that we can establish a productive and secure earth society, we do not belong anywhere else, nor (I suspect) would we be welcome elsewhere.

Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.

Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor bastards cannot."

Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.

Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.

A really failing society has a lot of rules (or laws).

I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

Permaculture challenges what we're doing and thinking - and to that extent it's sedition.