Paul Hawken famous quotes

All is connected ... no one thing can change by itself.
-- Paul Hawken

#Change #Connected

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
-- Paul Hawken

#Encouragement #Odds #Order

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
-- Paul Hawken

#Art #Interesting #Good Man

Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.
-- Paul Hawken

#Work #Enough Time #Economic

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
-- Paul Hawken

#Inspirational #Life #Religious

Only caring individuals can restore the places we inhabit. The 'simple act of planting a tree' not only restores the places we live, but makes us whole and powerful again.
-- Paul Hawken

#Powerful #Caring #Simple

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them
-- Paul Hawken

#Future #Vision #Trying

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet
-- Paul Hawken

#Business #Real #Earth

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
-- Paul Hawken

#Optimistic #Odds #Order

The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.
-- Paul Hawken

#Dreamer #World #Cynic

If they [companies] believe they are in business to serve people, to help solve problems, to use and employ the ingenuity of their workers to improve the lives of people around them by learning from the nature that gives us life, we have a chance.
-- Paul Hawken

#Inspiring #Believe #People

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don't poison the water, soil, or air, don't let the earth get overcrowded, and don't touch the thermostat have been broken
-- Paul Hawken

#Future #Air #Broken

A local company has more accountability.
-- Paul Hawken

#Accountability #Company

You are Brilliant and the Earth is Hiring
-- Paul Hawken

#Earth #Brilliant #Hiring

We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create.
-- Paul Hawken

#Trying #Poverty #Humans

We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms from landfills to Superfund cleanups, from deep-well injection to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use.
-- Paul Hawken

#Nuclear #Use #Waste

Don't be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
-- Paul Hawken

#Giving Up #People #Needs

Being a good human being is good business.
-- Paul Hawken

#Good Business #Humans

The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive.
-- Paul Hawken

#Future #Intelligent #Intelligence

The bottom line is down where it belongs - at the bottom.
-- Paul Hawken

#Lines #Bottom

The great thing about the dilemma we're in is that we get to re-imagine every single thing we do...There isn't a single thing that doesn't require a complete remake. There are two ways of looking at that. One is: Oh my gosh, what a big burden. The other way, which I prefer, is: What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world.
-- Paul Hawken

#Change #Two #Generations

My advice for people is to love the world they are in, in whatever way makes sense to them. It may be a devotional practice, it may be song or poetry, it may be by gardening, it may be as an activist, scientist, or community leader. The path to restoration extends from our heart to the heart of sentient beings, and that path will be different for every person.
-- Paul Hawken

#Song #Heart #Practice

Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich
-- Paul Hawken

#Way #Earth #Rich

Business is the only mechanism on the planet today powerful enough to produce the changes necessary to reverse global environments and social degradation.
-- Paul Hawken

#Powerful #Degradation #Today

While there may be no "right" way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.
-- Paul Hawken

#Years #Rivers #Giving

Wrong is an addictive, repetitive story; Right is where the movement is.
-- Paul Hawken

#Stories #Movement #Repetitive

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don’t have the correct data.  If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven’t got a heart.
-- Paul Hawken

#Optimistic #Heart #Data

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.
-- Paul Hawken

#Environmental #Use #Way

Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.
-- Paul Hawken

#Years #Information #Today

The problems to be faced are vast and complex, but come down to this: 6.6 billion people are breeding exponentially. The process of fulfilling their wants and needs is stripping earth of its biotic capacity to produce life; a climactic burst of consumption by a single species is overwhelming the skies, earth, waters, and fauna.
-- Paul Hawken

#Sky #Water #People

How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?
-- Paul Hawken

#Doe #Harm #Company

The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
-- Paul Hawken

#Running #Night #Sight

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.
-- Paul Hawken

#Calling #Stealing #Selling

Mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.
-- Paul Hawken

#Mother #Law #Safety

We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time.
-- Paul Hawken

#Losing #Social #Stability

Don't go to business school.
-- Paul Hawken

#Business #School #School Bus

I'd rather fail at something important than succeed at something trivial.
-- Paul Hawken

#Meaningful #Important #Succeed

We are the only species on this planet without full employment.
-- Paul Hawken

#Meaningful #Employment #Planets

People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.
-- Paul Hawken

#Technology #People #Age

Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.
-- Paul Hawken

#Spiritual #Inspiration #Humanity

The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss.
-- Paul Hawken

#Appreciation #Loss #Numbers

What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability.
-- Paul Hawken

#Government #Missing #Accountability

Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity; it is a sacred act.
-- Paul Hawken

#Party #Healing #Persistence

When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce.
-- Paul Hawken

#Dark #Order #Age

You can blame people who knock things over in the dark or you can begin to light candles. You're only at fault if you know about the problem and choose to do nothing.
-- Paul Hawken

#Healing #Dark #Light

Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.
-- Paul Hawken

#Business #Way #Making Money

Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break.
-- Paul Hawken

#Luck #Crafts #Break

It is critical to realize that underlying the extermination of nature is the marginalization of human beings. If we are to save what is wild, what is irreparable and majestic in nature, then we will ironically have to turn to each other and take care of all the human beings here on Earth. There is no boundary that will protect an environment from a suffering humanity.
-- Paul Hawken

#Humanity #Suffering #Earth

When the planes still swoop down and aerial spray a field in order to kill a predator insect with pesticides, we are in the Dark Ages of commerce. Maybe one thousandth of this aerial insecticide actually prevents the infestation. The balance goes to the leaves, into the soil, into the water, into all forms of wildlife, into ourselves. What is good for the balance sheet is wasteful of resources and harmful to life.
-- Paul Hawken

#Dark #Order #Water

What we already know frames what we see, and what we see frames what we understand.
-- Paul Hawken

#Insight

The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital.
-- Paul Hawken

#Corporations #Return #Financial

Local companies don't have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids.
-- Paul Hawken

#Kids #Play #Faces

In short, industrialism is over.
-- Paul Hawken

And also, more and more businesses really want to do the right thing. They feel better about themselves, their workers feel better, and so do their customers. I think this is equally true in the transnational corporations, but it is harder to express in those situations.
-- Paul Hawken

#Feel Better #Thinking #Want

Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables.
-- Paul Hawken

#Oil #Years #Wells

Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.
-- Paul Hawken

#Responsibility #Cost #Venture

I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.
-- Paul Hawken

#Country #Thinking #Political

Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.
-- Paul Hawken

#Moving #Intelligent #Self

It costs the same to send a person to prison or to Harvard. The difference is the curriculum.
-- Paul Hawken

#Differences #Curriculum #Cost

The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy.
-- Paul Hawken

#Philosophy #Creative #Promise

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.
-- Paul Hawken

#Long #Environmental #Path

What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive, because this generation gets to completely change this world.
-- Paul Hawken

#Generations #Alive #World

Business is correct to defend its right to act in order to produce a vigorous and engaging prosperity. But it is wrong if it forgets that this freedom can only be experienced within the discipline of social responsibility.
-- Paul Hawken

#Responsibility #Order #Discipline

First we need to decide what needs to be done. Then we do it. And then we ask if it is possible.
-- Paul Hawken

#Firsts #Needs #Done

How is it that we have created an economic system that tells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both? Is it rational to have an pricing system which discounts the future and sells off the past? How did we create an economic system that confused capital liquidation with income?
-- Paul Hawken

#Confused #Past #People

There are insistent calls for autonomy, appeals for a new resource ethic based on the tradition of the commons, demands for the reinstatement of cultural primacy over corporate hegemony, and a rising demand for radical transparency in politics and corporate decision making. It has been said that environmentalism failed as a movement, or worse yet, died. It is the other way around. Everyone on earth will be an environmentalist in the not too distant future, driven there by necessity and experience.
-- Paul Hawken

#Decision #Hegemony #Rising

Natural capitalism is not about making sudden changes, uprooting institutions, or fomenting upheaval for a new social order. Natural capitalism is about making small, critical choices that can tip economic and social factors in positive ways.
-- Paul Hawken

#Business #Order #Choices

If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come the grass roots up, not from the top down.
-- Paul Hawken

#Inspirational #Nature #Roots

If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.
-- Paul Hawken

#Focus #Trying #Pessimistic

We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good.
-- Paul Hawken

#Powerful #Thinking #Practice

That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.
-- Paul Hawken

#Age #Information #Transformation

Green business is not about tie-dyed T-shirts. It's about transforming the industrial system itself into one that looks at all the connections.
-- Paul Hawken

#Ties #Looks #Green

We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.
-- Paul Hawken

#Life #Down And #Slow Down

If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you´re too late
-- Paul Hawken

#Thinking #Ideas #Too Late