Paul Hawken Quotes - Page 2

Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.

Being a good human being is good business.

If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.

his planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.

If they [companies] believe they are in business to serve people, to help solve problems, to use and employ the ingenuity of their workers to improve the lives of people around them by learning from the nature that gives us life, we have a chance.

If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you´re too late

We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time.

We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.

I'd rather fail at something important than succeed at something trivial.

When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce. Maybe one thousandth of this aerial insecticide actually prevents the infestation. The balance goes to the leaves, into the soil, into the water, into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves. What is good for the balance sheet is wasteful of resources and harmful to life.

How is it that we have created an economic system that tells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both? Is it rational to have an pricing system which discounts the future and sells off the past? How did we create an economic system that confused capital liquidation with income?

We have reached a point where the value we do add to our economy is now being outweighed by the value we are removing, not only from future generations in terms of diminished resources, but from ourselves in terms of unlivable cities, deadening jobs, deteriorating health, and rising crime. In biological terms, we have become a parasite and are devouring our host.

Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.

It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.

We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.

Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.

We are the only species on this planet without full employment.

If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.

What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability.

A local company has more accountability.

Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break.

The bottom line is down where it belongs - at the bottom.

The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy.

How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?

I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.