When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough.

I think Americans are so poor it's pitiful, because you don't understand the natural world at all.

I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

Humans were my study animal now - I set up night watches on them, and I made phonograms of the noises they make. I studied their cries, and their contact calls, and their alarm signals. I never listened to what they were saying - I watched what they were doing, which is really the exact opposite of the Freuds and Jungs and Adlers.

What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness.

You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency.

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.