Sustainable Development Quotes

We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

The earth always belongs to the living.

My final aim is to bring Iran, within twenty years, to the same level of civilization and progress as will be enjoyed by the most highly developed countries. During the last ten years the degree of our backwardness has been halved, but it is this remaining backwardness which will be the most difficult to combat.

This urbanization that's taking place around the world is very real. But if it's people that are seeking an urbanized environment out of desperation, that's not going to be helpful long term.

We must adjust our value systems and work to modify today's societies, in which economic interests are carried to the extreme and irrationally produce not merely objects, but weapons of war. These societies don't care about the destruction of the planet and mankind as long as they earn profits - it can't go on like this.

Markets work; morals matter.

We do not build speedways, but roads which correspond to the character of the German landscape.

Are we better off if we displace jobs and investments to other countries and global emissions go up? I say no. Let's bring that production here and have less emissions globally because we can make things more efficiently and cleaner.

The Green New Deal fundamentally destroys our economy and does a lot of other weird stuff, too.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources depend and will depend in the future on the absolute level of total economic activity. This means that is necessary to restrain both the rate of growth of population and, at least in the developed countries, the rate of growth of consumption per head.

Peace, Bread & Land

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space.

The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated

Especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately impacted tribal communities, we must invest in infrastructure in order to advance economic recovery and create much-needed jobs.

The benefits and consequences of globalization have a great deal to do with whether we're intelligent and thoughtful about how we approach globalization, or whether we're blindly accepting... or blindly resistant.

The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment to those excluded from the appropriation.

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed

Abolish Poverty

Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.

It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.

To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing