Quotes from Susan George

There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.

Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.

What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.

We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.

I was recently looking at what they can actually do to reduce consumption of petrol. It would be quite possible to build automobiles out of carbon fibre that would be just as strong, weigh 10 times less and consume 10 times less petrol.

What is not fair now is that corporations pay less and less tax, which means that you and I pay more because we're rooted somewhere, they've got our address, right?

There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production.

If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

Markets cant think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.

Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.

The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.

Redistribution of wealth would require enormous amounts of investment. The only time an elite has accepted this has been during crises, such as in America in the 1930s under Roosevelt.

If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.

What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.

I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.

The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.

Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We've seen only the tiniest beginnings of that.

How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.

The question is not only what is grown but what it's used for. There's not going to be a mass transformation of dietary habits in rich countries-on the contrary, the first thing people do when they become more prosperous is to buy more meat.

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.