Bill Mollison Quotes

“Should we tamper with nature?" is no longer a question - we've tampered with nature on the whole face of the Earth.”

“A house should look after itself - as the weather heats up the house cools down, as the weather cools down the house heats up. It's simple stuff, you know? We've known how to do it for a long time.”

“Anarchy would suggest you're not cooperating. Permaculture is urging complete cooperation between each other and every other thing, animate and inanimate.”

“Another thing I find extremely eerie is that when people build a house, they almost exactly get it wrong. They don't just get it partly wrong, they get it dead wrong.”

“Anyone who ever studied mankind by listening to them was self-deluded. The first thing they should have done was to answer the question, "Can they report to you correctly on their behavior?" And the answer is, "No, the poor b*stards cannot.”

“Anything that's any good is self-perpetuating.”

“Anything that's left that's remotely like wilderness should be left strictly alone. We have no business there any more. It's not going to save you to go in and cut the last old-stand forests.”

“At least half of every city is wrong. From latitude 30 degrees to latitude 60, say, you've got to have the long axis of the house facing the sun. If the land is cut up into squares, that makes half of all houses wrong if they face the road. Even houses way in the country, and way off the road, face the bloody road. And from there, you just go wronger all the way.”

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

“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.”

“I believe humanity is a pretty interesting lot, and they're all really busy doing and thinking interesting things.”

“I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.”

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

“I gave one permaculture course in Botswana, and now my students are out in the bloody desert in Namibia teaching Bushmen - whose language nobody can speak - to be very good permaculture people.”

“I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.”

“I probably lead a very spoiled life, because I travel from people interested in permaculture to people interested in permaculture. Some of them are tribal, and some of them are urban, and so on.”

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

“I think it's pointless asking questions like "Will humanity survive?" It's purely up to people - if they want to, they can, if they don't want to, they won't.”

“I think mine is a very rich life.”

“I think the world would function extremely well with millions of little cooperative groups, all in relation to each other.”

“I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.”

“I'd come into town from the bush - after 28 years of field work in natural systems - and become an academic. So I turned my attention to humans, much as I had to possums in the forests.”

“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.”

“If people want some guidance, I say, just look at what people really do. Don't listen to them that much.”

“If you lend your skills to other systems that you don't really believe in, then you might as well never have lived. You haven't expressed yourself.”

“If you let people loose in a landscape and tell them to choose a house site, half of them will go sit on the ridges where they'll die in the next fire, or where you can't get water to them. Or they'll sit in all the dam sites. Or they'll sit in all the places that will perish in the next big wind.”

“If you let the world roll on the way it's rolling, you're voting for death. I'm not voting for death.”

“If you're a simple person today, and want to live simply, that is awfully seditious. And to advise people to live simply is more seditious still.”

“If you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them.”

“Instead of physicists teaching physics, physicists should go home and see what physics applies to their home.”