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The corporations are powerful only because we have allowed them to be. In theory, it is we, not they, who mandate the state. But we have neglected our duty of citizenship, and they have taken advantage of our neglect to seize the reins of government.

George Monbiot

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George Monbiot
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: January 27
Activist
Climate Activist
Environmentalist
Journalist
University Teacher
Writer
George Joshua Richard Monbiot
Government
Allowed
Reins
Advantage
Mandates
Duty
Seize
Theory
Globalization
Taken
Neglected
Powerful
Citizenship
State
Neglect
States
Corporations
Mandate

More quotes by George Monbiot

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There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground.
George Monbiot
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Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?
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Change arises from conviction. Stop voting in fear. Start voting for hope.
George Monbiot
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The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians.
George Monbiot
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Almost all systems of economic thought are premised on the idea of continued economic growth, which would be fine and dandy if we lived on an infinite planet, but there's this small, niggling, inconvenient fact that the planet is, in fact, finite, and that, unlike economic theory, it is governed by physical and biological reality
George Monbiot
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Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading. It is unsurprising that all conservative parties claim to hate big government.
George Monbiot
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Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.
George Monbiot
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All the money, all the prestige in the world will never make up for the loss of your freedom.
George Monbiot
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Until now I believed that the nation that has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
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Like other lifeforms, we [humans] exist only to replicate ourselves.
George Monbiot
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When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they call you a communist.
George Monbiot
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Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
George Monbiot
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If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
George Monbiot
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In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair.
George Monbiot
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Soil is an almost magical substance, a living system that transforms the materials it encounters.
George Monbiot
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Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.
George Monbiot
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If global warming is not contained, the West will face a choice of a refugee crisis of unimaginable proportions, or direct complicity in crimes against humanity.
George Monbiot
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It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
George Monbiot
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Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.
George Monbiot
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The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians.
George Monbiot