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" Before they got vengeful, conservatives had some useful points to make about welfare. Government 'help' is too often guilt-assuaging gesture. It creates layers of wasteful bureaucracy. Too much help of the wrong sort creates a culture of dependency that swamps our ability to provide. "

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" Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course. "

Donella Meadows

Great

Revolution

Change

" Ending poverty calls for humility, honesty, freedom from ideology and refusal to accept cruel simplicities about anyone's human potential. It requires listening to the wisdom and cutting the nonsense from both the Right and the Left. "

" At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation. "

" George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman. "

" We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection. "

" What Clinton did with Lewinsky was despicable but was no threat to the nation. That he lied about it repeatedly and to the public is a reason for us to cease to trust him and for him to resign. "

" Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent. "

" We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found. "

" Everyone except the far right wing of the Republican Party realizes that oil, gas and coal burning are the main activities that have sent the climate into bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos. "

" Growth is a stupid goal. So, by the way, is no-growth. "

" It's a fair guess that at the rate we're destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we're pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn't count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone. "

" Smart development builds on a region's own skills, resources and local businesses. Dumb growth invites a big corporation in, surrenders control and profits to a distant headquarters, undercuts local manufacturers, and risks layoffs without warning. "

" Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm. "

" The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made. "

" Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it. "

" We are dependent not so much on Earth, the third planet orbiting the sun, as on Gaea, the integrated system that includes, sustains and is shaped by life. "

" A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world's nations toward saving the climate. "

" There have been high crimes and misdemeanors, but they have been committed by the special prosecutor and the Congress, not the president. "

" Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one. "

" A grand jury hears only one side - that of the prosecutor. "

" Corporate responsibility extends not only to the customers, the resources and the workers of the present, but also to those of the future. "

" The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes. "

" If we emit massive quantities of untested chemicals into the environment, some of them are bound to end up in places that surprise us, doing things that endanger us. "

" We have come to expect campaigns to be mean and stupid and politicians to be unresponsive, self-seeking and for sale to the highest bidder. We make jokes about our vice president, and all we ask of a president is that he be likeable. We seem to have given up on the Pentagon's corrupt use of our tax dollars. "

" World fertility surveys indicate that anywhere from one third to one half of the babies born in the Third World would not be if their mothers had access to cheap, reliable family planning, had enough personal empowerment to stand up to their husbands and relatives, and could choose their own family size. "

" Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. "

" I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes. "

" Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes. "

" We don't need new laws that can be used by organizations with deep pockets and the ability to deduct legal expenses as a cost of doing business to intimidate individuals or organizations that voice legitimate concerns. "

" The kind of support the down-and-out need is the kind we have always refused them, the kind that would mean engaging with them not as objects of contempt, but as fellow human beings. "