Frances Moore Lappé Quotes

What an extraordinary time to be alive. We're the first people on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest. Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose death; or we can choose life.

What is different and exciting is how much we have learned. We learned we were right that we don't need the chemical model of agriculture. We know so much more about the life of soil now and we understand how plants synergistically work together with microbes and animals to create healthy conditions.

Nature is with us if we can learn how to align with it and not break the basic laws that generate life.

I read a book in the late 1990s called The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm, and it had a profound impact on me. Fromm takes Descartes' statement, "I think, therefore I am" and changes it to "I effect, therefore I am."

The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth.

Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.

Hunger is a people-made phenomenon, so the central issue is power: the power of those who make the decisions about what is grown and who, or what, it's grown for.

Breaking with the pack may be exactly what we should be doing. Saying "no" to the dominant culture that is trapping us in destructive ways of living might be the most life-serving thing we can do.

Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity.

Hope is not what we find in evidence, it's what we become in action.

Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.

I learned this [ that fear doesn't have to stop me] when my world came apart. I was living a life-long dream of a family life combined with an organization to promote living democracy - all on a gorgeous 45-acre compound in rural Vermont. I'd spent a decade building my dream, and then it started to crumble, piece by piece - my marriage, my organization, my confidence.

We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling automobiles. Big cars made sense only when oil was cheap; grain-fed meat makes sense only because the true costs of producing it are not counted.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.

The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.

The good life is not about avoiding fear. Just the opposite.

Freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.

The spirit that I am advocating is reframing how we view the world, and shifting from the negativity of lack and "not enough" to the positive frame of aligning with Nature.

This is the first generation to know that the choices we're making have ultimate consequences. It's a time when you either choose life or you choose death ... Going along with the current order means that you're choosing death.

Humans need to feel effective - to feel that we can "make a dent," as he puts it. So the art of living is to find expressions appropriate to our own uniqueness in which we can experience effectiveness.

Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.

My path has not been smooth. But the great thing about getting to be an elder is that you can look back and see the intense times of confusion and challenge, and see that if you keep walking through them, they can lead to times of great satisfaction and reward.

If we start with "limits" and a premise of scarcity and fear, it makes us fearful of each other, and that makes us vulnerable to anti-democratic systems.

We didn't evolve to be passive victims or shoppers.

I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.