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I'd rather have that dialogue right now than only the other one, which is starting at such a basic level, that we start rearranging stuff on the Titanic, trying to be less bad with ordinary stuff.

William McDonough

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William McDonough
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: February 20
Architect
Designer
Environmentalist
Writer
Tōkyō
William Andrews McDonough
Levels
Start
Rearranging
Rather
Titanic
Less
Dialogue
Stuff
Basic
Right
Starting
Trying
Ordinary
Level

More quotes by William McDonough

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It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.
William McDonough
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We achieved our mission to the moon. Let's look home from that lofty perch and reimagine our mission on Earth - that is what we need to do here. Together, we can upcycle everything. The world will be better for our positive visions and actions.
William McDonough
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This idea that things are designed to go back to nature or industry for ever which is our articulation of these two metabolisms are actually a discovery not an invention.
William McDonough
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Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.
William McDonough
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We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem
William McDonough
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Modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, I didn't intend to cause global warning, it's not part of my plan, then we realize it's part of our defacto plan because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan.
William McDonough
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We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.
William McDonough
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The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.
William McDonough
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We are not a green standard, we are a quality standard. We're different, we're multi dimensional.
William McDonough
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Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them right, with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.
William McDonough
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Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.
William McDonough
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Designing renders visible our hopes and dreams. It is the first signal of human intentions.
William McDonough
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The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.
William McDonough
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In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'
William McDonough
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Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place
William McDonough
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Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'
William McDonough
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Honor commerce as the engine of change.
William McDonough
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If design is the first signal of human intention.
William McDonough
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The problem carbon is that everyone thinks we have an energy problem, we don't. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. Carbon is a material, so we have a material problem, not an energy problem.
William McDonough
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We have carbon in the atmosphere. That is a material in the wrong place problem. It's just like what I said about the lead. Lead in the biosphere is not good. Carbon in the atmosphere (over natural levels) is a problem.
William McDonough