Quotes from Frances Moore Lappé

Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain.

I've grown certain that the root of all fear is that we've been forced to deny who we are.

For freedom is not the capacity to do whatever we please; freedom is the capacity to make intelligent choices.

Luxury as beauty" has nothing to do with a particular place or an object's price tag. It is seeing with eyes for beauty. Once we cut the automatic but learned connection between buying stuff and pleasure, we can actively cultivate new connections - a sense of freedom as we shed draining habits and discover new pleasures in seeing and creating beauty all around us.

I'm neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a dyed-in-the-wool possibilist! By this, I mean with an eco-mind, we see that everything's connected and change is the only constant.

The real cause of hunger is the powerlessness of the poor to gain access to the resources they need to feed themselves.

Hope is not what we find in evidence, it's what we become in action.

We're just a drop in the bucket, and that's meaningless. But we say, 'No, wait a minute. If you have a bucket, those raindrops fill it up very fast. Being a drop in the bucket is magnificent.' The problem is we cannot see the bucket. Our work is helping people see that there is a bucket. There are all these people all over the world who are creating this bucket of hope. And so our drops are incredibly significant.

Every choice we make can be a celebration of the world we want.

My whole mission in life is to help us find the power we lack to create the world we want.

With organic approaches, women - who have been gardeners for millennia and mothers forever - can rise because of their intimate knowledge of nature.

Individuality doesn't just mean individualism-standing alone. It means developing one's unique gifts, and being able to share them for the enjoyment of oneself and others.

Beauty is created by fellow human beings, and enhanced because they are in relationship with each other.

Beauty exists irrespective of financial circumstances.

I think we are at a new evolutionary stage. We evolved in tight-knit tribes in which we faced death if we didn't have the support of the rest of the tribe.

Hope is a stance, not an assessment.

For me, just showing up for the traveling and writing gave me the power to overcome my fear of fear.

If we start with "limits" and a premise of scarcity and fear, it makes us fearful of each other, and that makes us vulnerable to anti-democratic systems.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy.

Our heavily meat-centered culture is at the very heart of our waste of the earth's productivity.

much agricultural land which might be growing food is being used instead to 'grow' money (in the form of coffee, tea, etc.).

Our food system takes abundant grain,which people can't afford,and shrinks it into meat,which better-off people will pay for.

I was a compulsive eater in my late teens and until I wrote Diet for a Small Planet, so I know what it feels like when food becomes a threat.

No society has fulfilled its democratic promise if people go hungry... If some go without food they have surely been deprived of all power. The existence of hunger belies the existence of democracy.