Susan George Quotes

It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.

Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.

What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.

What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.

I used to work a lot on food issues and every time somebody predicted that production would be inadequate they got egg on their face a year or two later.

Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.

I'm a radical reformist, because between where we are and where I want to go there's a great deal of work, and I won't see the end of this.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

What's immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.

What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.

Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.

How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.

The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.

The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.

Markets can't think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.

What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right?

The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?

Subsidize ... or lend.

Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.