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" 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. "

Donella Meadows

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

" 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. "

" The actions of my government are not bearable. They devastate our natural resources and deprive our people. The politicians speak piously while practicing greed and divisiveness. They care nothing for the nation. I want to do more than withdraw my support. I want to tar and feather them. "

" Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. "

" Smart development invests in insulation, efficient cars, and ever-renewed sources of energy. Dumb growth crashes around looking for more oil. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading. "

" Once again I stopped listening to the news this week. "

" 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. "

" We don't need bigger cars or fancier clothes. We need self-respect, identity, community, love, variety, beauty, challenge and a purpose in living that is greater than material accumulation. "

" Every policy is shaped by two forces: background analysis and foreground politics. The political forces are loud, self-serving and, in the case of energy policy, well known. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" We wouldn't have to speak so critically if businesses would stop feeding dead animals to live ones, putting non-food substances into food, tinkering with genetic codes, and spraying the countryside with poisons. "

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

" The grand jury's job is not to weigh the evidence from both sides; it is only to decide whether there is enough evidence on one side to bring a person to trial. "

" 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. "

" Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up. "

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

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

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

" I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written. "

" No expectations, no tension between goals and performance, no outrage, resolve or intention, no action, no results. There's only one way to get a government - and a nation - to stop drifting to low performance. That's to wake up and insist on higher standards. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In 1994 the U.S. Court of Appeals decided in the case of Oliver North to permit the release of grand jury evidence, because it had already been so thoroughly leaked. "

" Social services, not wealth per se, seem to be the key to lower birth rates. The Chinese, although among the poorest peoples of the world, have brought their fertility rate down to 2.4, partly by social coercion, but mostly by broadly available education, health care and family planning. "