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If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic.

Paul Hawken

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Paul Hawken
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: February 8
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
San Mateo
California
Paul Gerard Hawken
Focus
Though
Natural
Change
Pessimistic
Even
Threatened
Trying
Prevent
Really
Corruption
Institutions

More quotes by Paul Hawken

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Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
Paul Hawken
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We are the only species on this planet without full employment.
Paul Hawken
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I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.
Paul Hawken
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That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age.
Paul Hawken
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How is it that we have created an economic system that tells us it is cheaper to destroy the earth and exhaust its people than to nurture them both? Is it rational to have an pricing system which discounts the future and sells off the past? How did we create an economic system that confused capital liquidation with income?
Paul Hawken
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While there may be no right way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.
Paul Hawken
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Business is correct to defend its right to act in order to produce a vigorous and engaging prosperity. But it is wrong if it forgets that this freedom can only be experienced within the discipline of social responsibility.
Paul Hawken
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The problems to be faced are vast and complex, but come down to this: 6.6 billion people are breeding exponentially. The process of fulfilling their wants and needs is stripping earth of its biotic capacity to produce life a climactic burst of consumption by a single species is overwhelming the skies, earth, waters, and fauna.
Paul Hawken
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Healing the wounds of the earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party, only gumption and persistence. It is not a liberal or conservative activity it is a sacred act.
Paul Hawken
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People are naming it the Third Wave, the Information Age, etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions, and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.
Paul Hawken
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Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.
Paul Hawken
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The bottom line is down where it belongs - at the bottom.
Paul Hawken
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What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change the world.
Paul Hawken
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Mother's milk would be banned by the food safety laws of industrialized nations if it were sold as a packaged good.
Paul Hawken
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Being in business is not about making money. It is a way to become who you are.
Paul Hawken
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Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production.
Paul Hawken
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Luck is earned. Luck is working so hard at your craft, service or enterprise that sooner or later you get a break.
Paul Hawken
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Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables.
Paul Hawken
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Businesses who are members of Businesses for Social Responsibility or the Social Venture Network are internalizing costs on a voluntary basis and therefore raising their costs of doing business, but their competitors are not required to.
Paul Hawken
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Don't go to business school.
Paul Hawken