The earth is what we all have in common.

There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

If you establish, or reestablish, local economies on the right scale and with the right standard, then politics would come right as a matter of course. I don't know what you'd call the result - probably not capitalism or socialism.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

It is understood that nonhuman creatures adapt to their places or they don't live. And for some reason that I can't figure out, even the biologists have excused our own species from that obligation. I think there's going to be a biological penalty to be paid for that eventually.

You can't know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction

To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.