"All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?"

"Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest know set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves."

"Where will you drive your own picket stake? Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at which you will finally stop running, at which you will finally fight back."

"To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation."

"The task we all face as human beings ... is to find and become who we are. The task teachers face is to find their own way of teaching, one that manifests who they are."

"We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind."

"I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet."

"The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment."

"It's okay to be happy, it's okay to live your life exactly the way you want it... It's okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are."

"The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves."

"Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable."

"There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists..."

"Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless."

"I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong."

"I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body."

"I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die."

"Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves."

"If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned."

"In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away."

"But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless."

"You can rarely prove something to someone who does not want to see it proven, and even more to the point, you can almost never prove something to someone who has financial or ideological reasons to not see it proven."

"A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope doesn't kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems - you ceased hoping your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself - and you just began doing what's necessary to solve your problems yourself."

"A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer."

"Civilization can never be sustainable."

"Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels."

"A language Older Than Words"

"If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence."

"There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends."

"I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly."

"Civilization is not and can never be sustainable."

"I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet,"

"All writers are propagandists."

"As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?"

"I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi."

"To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity."

"If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home."

"From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation."

"Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent."

"Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I'm not sure that's right"

"If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?"

"We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems."

"The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world."

"No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet."

"I'm frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies."

"A system of domination will always be undernourished."

"Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance"

"So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us."

"The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing."

"When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam."

"We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."