Quote

We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to conserve the environment so that we can bequeath our children a sustainable world that benefits all.

Wangari Maathai

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wangari Maathai
Age: 71 †
Born: 1940
Born: April 1
Died: 2011
Died: September 25
Biologist
Environmentalist
Political Activist
Politician
Teacher
Veterinarian
Wangari Maathaï
Maathai
Wangari Maathai
Environment
Next
Bequeath
Children
Conserve
World
Sustainable
Inspiring
Generation
Benefits
Generations

More quotes by Wangari Maathai

Image
Passion begins with a burden and a split-second moment, when you understand something like never before. That burden is on those who know. Those who don't know are at peace. Those of us who do know get disturbed and are forced to take action.
Wangari Maathai
Image
There will always be people who think that you have ambitions.
Wangari Maathai
Image
Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking.
Wangari Maathai
Image
I'm sure that many people who are involved in an environmental effort ... they will be pretty much encouraged by this recognition.
Wangari Maathai
Image
Culture is coded wisdom
Wangari Maathai
Image
Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.
Wangari Maathai
Image
It goes to local authorities and even to members of Parliament so that individual citizens almost become people who want to sit and wait for their member of Parliament to come and solve the problem. Now that won't take you anywhere. And if you follow it, you will see that it feeds corruption in the country.
Wangari Maathai
Image
I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me.
Wangari Maathai
Image
The people are learning that you cannot leave decisions only to leaders. Local groups have to create the political will for change, rather than waiting for others to do things for them. That is where positive, and sustainable, change begins.
Wangari Maathai
Image
In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families.
Wangari Maathai
Image
It is wonderful when you don't have the fear, and a lot of the time I don't ... I focus on what needs to be done instead.
Wangari Maathai
Image
You can educate people on how to preempt their own conflict.
Wangari Maathai
Image
Why do we have to have people come from afar to come and grow food for us, or to grow food to sell to us? It is partly because we are almost becoming used to people doing things for us. Like somebody else is going to solve that problem for us. And that to me is very disempowering system.
Wangari Maathai
Image
The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter.
Wangari Maathai
Image
There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting.
Wangari Maathai
Image
You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself. That values itself. That understands itself.
Wangari Maathai
Image
You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.
Wangari Maathai
Image
Education is a very empowering experience, so many people who went to school also managed to improve their quality of life much faster because they could get a job, they could get money. Once people see that you improve your life if you are educated, then education becomes a valuable tool and people want it.
Wangari Maathai
Image
We do the right thing not to please people but because it's the only logically reasonable thing to do, as long as we are being honest with ourselves - even if we are the only ones.
Wangari Maathai
Image
The American government has spent a lot of money trying to reclaim, for example, the Everglades, and to allow the natural vegetation at the coastal areas to be restored because that was part of the vegetation that actually protected the hinterlands.
Wangari Maathai