Quotes About Interdependence

We are all nature, all made of the same basic materials, with the same basic needs. We are no different, on a very basic level, from the ducks and the mussels and last week's coleslaw. Thus we should respect Nature, and when we die, we should give ourselves back to the earth.

If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.

It's because we help out when they're in trouble that we can count on them to come running when we need it. -Shikamaru Nara

We relate to the virus, in some ways, as we relate to Trump. We yearn desperately to return to a time of imagined normalcy, before Trump and before the coronavirus. But we can heal only by looking forward—perhaps to a life that will be slower, more environmentally responsible and less materially comfortable, but also more clearly rooted in mutual aid and the understanding of our fundamental equality and interdependence.

With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no sense.

In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.

That is the point of agriculture: it diverts the labour of other species to providing services for human beings.

In civilized society,' wrote Adam Smith, an individual 'stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.

I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has brought no improvement in the standard of living, or that the world is steadily deteriorating, or that the exchange of things and ideas is a superfluous irrelevance.

The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind; it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation.

That is possible only because each square metre is encouraged to grow whatever it is good at growing and global trade distributes the result to ensure that everybody gets a bit of everything

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assembled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

The more human beings diversified as consumers and specialised as producers, and the more they then exchanged, the better off they have been, are and will be.

No one fixes the world alone.

All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil.

There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.

There's nothing important on earth, except human beings. There's nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another....

If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire.

Las personas son importantes sólo en relación a los demás, en la medida de su utilidad, en el servicio que brindan. A menos que entiendas esto no puedes esperar nada, sino una u otra forma de sufrimiento.

More than anything, it is that sense - that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together - that we can't afford to lose.

I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone--and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.

My liberty depends on you being free, too.

En ese mundo —de cadenas de suministro globales, transferencias de capital instantáneas, redes terroristas transnacionales, cambio climático, migraciones masivas y cada vez mayor complejidad— aprenderemos a convivir, a cooperar los unos con los otros y a reconocer la dignidad de los demás, o pereceremos.