Bill Mollison Quotes Page 4

“The important thing is not to do any agriculture whatsoever, and particularly to make the modern agricultural sciences a forbidden area - they're worse than witchcraft, really.”

“The worst thing about permaculture is that it's extremely successful, but it has no center, and no hierarchy.”

“There are only four things in all cleaners - whether it's shampoo, laundry detergent, whatever.You buy them in bulk and you mix them up properly, and they all work. It doesn't matter if they call the stuff ecologically friendly or have dolphins diving around on the label - it still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.”

“Use all the skills you have in relation to others - and that way we can do anything.”

“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.”

“We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.”

“We have to let nature put what's left together, and see what it can come up with to save our ass.”

“We have to rethink how we're going to live on this earth - stop talking about the fact that we've got to have agriculture, we've got to have exports, because all that is the death of us.”

“Wealth is a deep understanding of the natural world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Why is it that we don't build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it's a trivial thing to do?”

“Women spend the money of society on its goods.”

“You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.”

“You can't live like a Bushman or an Aborigine anymore, so they've got to rethink the whole basis of how they're going to live. Permaculture helps you do that easily.”

“You should never have gotten to the stage where you could see the last ancient forests! Just get out of there right now, because the lessons you need to learn are there. That's the last place you'll find those lessons readable.”

“You won't get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced directions from the top, and nothing I know of can run like that.”