Vandana Shiva famous quotes

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Economy #Currency

The liberation of the earth, the liberation of women, the liberation of all humanity is the next step of freedom we need to work for, and it's the next step of peace that we need to create.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Humanity #Earth #Next

I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit — profits extracted at the cost of life.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Loyalty #Country #Thinking

I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that itself creates new potential.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Believe #Thinking #Enlargement

We've moved from wisdom to knowledge, and now we're moving from knowledge to information, and that information is so partial – that we're creating incomplete human beings.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Moving #Creating #Information

The time has come to reclaim the stolen harvest and celebrate the growing and giving of good food as the highest gift and the most revolutionary act.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Giving #Growing #Revolutionary

We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Earth Day #Way #Making Peace

It's not an investment if its destroying the planet.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Investment #Planets #Destroying

I describe what is happening as 'food fascism' because this system can only survive through totalitarian control. With patents on seed, an illegitimate legal system is manipulated to create seed monopolies. Seed laws that require uniformity - which criminalize diversity and the use of open-pollinated seeds - are fascist in nature. Suing farmers after contaminating their crops is another aspect of this fascism. Pseudo-hygiene laws that criminalize local, artisanal food are food fascism. And attacks on scientists and the silencing of independent research are examples of knowledge fascism.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Independent #Law #Hygiene

The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Luxury #Justice #Diversity

Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Two #Water #Earth

An organic farmer is the best peacemaker today, because there is more violence, more death, more destruction, more wars, through a violent industrial agricultural system. And to shift away from that into an agriculture of peace is what organic farming is doing.
-- Vandana Shiva

#War #Agriculture #Today

Biopiracy (is) biological theft; illegal collection of indigenous plants by corporations who patent them for their own use.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Use #Corporations #Patents

Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature's gift and denies the poor of their human rights.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Rights #Giving #Water

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Nature #Food #Growth

We must occupy the food system to create food democracy.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Democracy

As usual, in every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Usual #Poor #Schemes

I like to live my life so that my loved ones give me the things I need as gifts and I give them the things they need. Frankly a society built around consumerism is hell
-- Vandana Shiva

#Giving #Needs #Hell

We will either defend the rights of people and the earth, and for that we have to dismantle the rights that corporations have assigned to themselves, or corporations will in the next three decades destroy this planet, in terms of human possibilities.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Rights #People #Three

You are not Atlas carrying the world on your shoulder. It is good to remember that the planet is carrying you.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Inspirational #Inspiring #World

Genetic engineering has never been about saving the world, it's about controlling the world.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Engineering #World #Saving

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Bacteria #Genes #Insert

I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Thinking #Joy #Celebration

Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Oil #Humanity #Soil

Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Diversity #Way

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Violence #Needs #Patterns

Whatever happens to seed affects the web of life.
-- Vandana Shiva

If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Giving #Earth #Company

Seed is not just the source of life. It is the very foundation of our being.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Foundation #Source

It is not an investment if it destroys the planet
-- Vandana Shiva

#Investment #Planets

Everything I need to know I learned in the forest
-- Vandana Shiva

#Needs #Forests

We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Struggle #Our Generation #Generations

democracy ... begins from the ground up. Anything living grows from the bottom up. Everything dangerous, like bombs, gets dropped from the sky down.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Sky #Democracy #Bombs

The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Mean #Hands #Inappropriate

We're still eating the leftovers of World War II.
-- Vandana Shiva

#War #Leftovers #World

Earth Democracy connects people in circles of care, cooperation, and compassion instead of dividing them through competition and conflict, fear and hatred.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Compassion #Circles #People

Unless the poor of the world agitate for themselves to be heard, there will be no changes in their circumstances
-- Vandana Shiva

#World #Poor #Circumstances

The only way to build hope is throuhgh the Earth.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Earth #Way

The best and most evolved technologies are those that do not destroy the very base on which we live
-- Vandana Shiva

#Business #Technology #Management

In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Mother #Agriculture #Giving

Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Real #Believe #Responsibility

Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Luxury #Diversity #Survival

The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Life #Letting Go #Art

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Abuse #Earth #Ecological Crisis

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.
-- Vandana Shiva

#War #Moving #Ecosystems

When you control seed you control food
-- Vandana Shiva

Food is the place where you begin.
-- Vandana Shiva

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.
-- Vandana Shiva

#People #Earth #Green

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Home #Justice #Use

In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.
-- Vandana Shiva

#War #Democracy #Answers

The end of consumerism and accumulation is the beginning of the joy of living.
-- Vandana Shiva

#Joy #Accumulation #Ends