Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.

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

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.

When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don't grow their own vegetables, in fact they're not deep ecologists - they're my enemies.

We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible.

I'm certain I don't know what permaculture is. That's what I like about it - it's not dogmatic. But you've got to say it's about the only organized system of design that ever was. And that makes it extremely eerie.