Quote

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

Bill Mollison

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill Mollison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: May 4
Died: 2016
Died: September 24
Anthropologist
Author
Biologist
Ecologist
Environmentalist
Farmer
Naturalist
Psychologist
Stanley
Tasmania
Australia
Make
Never
People
Gardener
Philosophers
Philosopher
Teach

More quotes by Bill Mollison

Image
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?
Bill Mollison
Image
If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.
Bill Mollison
Image
You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.
Bill Mollison
Image
Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony, opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.
Bill Mollison
Image
If you only do one thing, collect rainwater.
Bill Mollison
Image
Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.
Bill Mollison
Image
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.
Bill Mollison
Image
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.
Bill Mollison
Image
Trees are responsible for 3/4 of all rains
Bill Mollison
Image
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.
Bill Mollison
Image
Choose your friends from people who you like what they do - even though you mightn't like what they say.
Bill Mollison
Image
We don't have to suppose we need oil, or governments, or anything.
Bill Mollison
Image
To create a mess in which we perish by our own inaction makes nonsense of our claim to consciousness and morality
Bill Mollison
Image
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.
Bill Mollison
Image
I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you'll get a philosopher.
Bill Mollison
Image
Women spend the money of society on its goods.
Bill Mollison
Image
I think we probably have a racial death wish. We don't understand anything about where we live, and we don't want to.
Bill Mollison
Image
You can't cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things.
Bill Mollison
Image
Permaculture is something with a million heads. It's a way of thinking which is already loose, and you can't put a way of thinking back in the box.
Bill Mollison
Image
Compressed air can provide limitless amounts of clean energy using technology we have had for hundreds of years.
Bill Mollison